Getting Lost in La Foresta-Radice-Labirinto: Calvino and the Pedagogy of Landscape for Children

The paper examines La Foresta-Radice-Labirinto (1981), a fairy tale which is one of Italo Calvino’s latest and lesser known works. In what can be regarded as his testament, Calvino looks back on and revives the ecological commitment of his literary production and his attention to the complex relationship between nature and culture, which has been a prominent leitmotif of his writings (from The Baron in the Trees to The Cloud of Smog, and from the adventures of Marcovaldo to the Invisible Cities). The paper offers a detailed symbological and eco-critical analysis of the text, in order to examine an ‘ecology of mind’ as developed by Calvino, invariably sensitive to hybridisation and to the ongoing and often difficult relation between historical and environmental mutations. In doing so, the paper lists and explores the construction of images-icons and figures-types that make up what Calvino calls ‘a pedagogy of imagination’. The paper focuses on Calvino’s dedication to education through fairy tales as a primary form of experience, capable of conveying universal messages to a young readership, and on his longing for an authentic exposure to the environment, where getting lost means finding oneself and where chaos leads to a new order, founded on an ethical search for a more harmonious union of city, human beings and nature.