«Il corpo della gente che aveva un corpo». Metamorfosi corporee nel Cavaliere inesistente di Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino has often pointed out that the three novels of the trilogy Our Ancestors have their primary inspiration in specific images. He, however, has never remarked that the three visual sources belong to the same metaphorical field: the body and its limits. The article examines how Calvino’s literary development of those images revolves around the central issue of overcoming physical limitations as a metaphor for “self-realisation as human beings”. The metamorphoses of the body in The Nonexistent Knight and their literary representation are here investigated as a foremost example of this pivotal process at the core of Calvino’s trilogy.