Il Menabò,Calvino and the ‘Avanguardie’: Some Observations on the Literary Debate of the Sixties

The literary venture of the periodical Il Menabò, created by Elio Vittorini and Italo Calvino, had a relatively short life span. Ten issues were published between 1959 and 1967, with the last one entirely devoted to Vittorini, whose death brought the project to a halt. A few months later, Calvino would move to Paris, almost as if to make his detachment from the Italian literary milieu geographically explicit.