American Lessons by Italo Calvino

Artwork by Andrea Filiberti 

AMERICAN LESSONS Six Memos for the Next Millennium

A book with an official title left hanging; this is how Esther Calvino, the author's wife, describes the book in the introduction to the posthumous edition of the book, published by the publisher Mondadori. So I wanted to focus on the meaning given by the book's title draft, which in my opinion is even more explicit: “six proposals for the new millennium.” Indeed, the book traces a path made up of five (and a half) transcribed lessons that are meant to leave a testament for the discipline of literature, speaking of “some literary values to be preserved in the next millennium.”

Having defined that the focus of the book was the identification of values to be kept in mind to keep the discipline alive, so I asked myself:

Is it possible to draw parallels between the themes identified by Italo Calvino for literature and some 

themes that are fundamental to architecture? Is it then possible to represent the equivalent in architecture 

of these values to be preserved from the last century?

I have selected parts of the chosen chapters that, by translating the relevance of some words from literature to architecture, can still be consistent. These are paired with some drawings related to some of the most relevant architecture in history (the Parthenon in Athens and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin), such that we get “three memos for our millennium” to be preserved as well.