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Rating: Everyone knows Italo Calvino, perhaps he is the most national-popular writer in Italy.
Who has never held one of his books in their hands? Marcovaldo, The Baron in the Trees, The Nonexistent Knight, The Cloven Viscount, among the most read and overused from Elementary, Middle, and High School. Everyone recognizes a particular lightness and spontaneity in his writing, an apparent simplicity made of short and direct sentences that make reading smooth thanks also to an extraordinary inventiveness.
"The Path to the Nest of Spiders" is his first novel. Published in '47, it recounts his partisan experience through the eyes of little Pin, a child raised by his sister, a whore (in the sense of prostitute), among the alleys of a small seaside village in Liguria. He lives among adults, among the drunkards of the tavern and the brothel house where the Nazis roam in search of sex. Ending up in jail is just a matter of time, especially after stealing and hiding (in the woods where the spiders make nests) a pistol from a Nazi to prove his loyalty to the partisan cause. In prison, he will meet Lupo Rosso, who will help him escape and join the antifascist groups hidden in the Ligurian Alps. Partisan life will reveal to the little one a world of heroes and damned, of hustlers and mediocre people. It will open his eyes to a slice of life where, besides Good, he will find Evil, besides purity, deceit, and besides military rigidity, surreptitious sex.
"The Path to the Nest of Spiders" is perhaps the most beautiful partisan story ever written. It is a story stripped of any rhetoric, simple and fantastic, where everything is filtered through the consciousness of an adolescent: battle, Resistance, friendship, betrayals are projections of a soul uncorrupted by violence and war. In his mind, the path to the nest of spiders is a place of peace and security, a hidden and clandestine refuge, a fairy-tale world where only trusted people can access.
Calvino gently leads us into an atrocious world, leaving us in the hands of a child certain of being on the right side. Pin is a dear companion who, sooner or later, will grow up, become bad, and maybe even cruel. Pin is the perfection of the Idea that only time can corrupt.
"The Path to the Nest of Spiders" is a short journey that everyone should undertake, even if only to remove from their conscience certain encrustations accumulated over seventy years of more or less truthful stories.
It is a book that does good, for everyone.
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