Italo Calvino’s neo-Epicurean philosophy of lightness

Abstract

This paper shows Calvino’s fictional worlds as rediscoveries of the Epicurean and Lucretian principles of worlds made up of void and atoms where the void is just as important and rich with consequences as the atoms. Thus, in his Trilogy of Our Ancestors, questions of right and wrong, choices as simple as turning right or turning left, eating or not eating are set out in terms of a body confronted with the materiality (or absence of materiality) of the world around it; a full encountering a void. We propose a reading of Calvino’s works as a form of neo-Epicureanism in which heroes come to terms with the void inside and out of them, to live a full life in an half-empty world.