SULL’EREDITÀ CULTURALE CON CALVINO ED ECO: PERCHÉ LEGGERE I CLASSICI E NON SPERATE DI LIBERARVI DAI LIBRI

Abstract

On Cultural Heritage with Calvino and Eco: Why Read the Classics and Don’t Hope to Get Rid of Books. Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco have expressed throughout their lives, both through their work and through their public appearances, their vision on the importance of past cultural heritage, literature, books, classics. This study aims to analyze, in particular, four writings of the two authors in which they speak about classics, books, reading and the importance of knowledge in general in our lives. In the essay Why read the Classics?, Calvino gives us fourteen definitions and as many reasons to get closer to the work of the great classics of literature. In the dialogue between Umberto Eco and the French writer Jean-Claude Carrière, entitled Don`t hope to get rid of books, they talk about their passion for books, for reading, about what we inherited from the past and about what we will leave to the future generations. One of the most burning problems we face today is that of filtering and selection and the criteria by which we select what to keep and what to bury from the multitude of publications that appear today. In the extraordinary essay entitled American Lessons: six proposals for the next millennium, Calvino leaves us a precious legacy in which he anticipates the qualities that the literature of our century should have and convinces us, once again, of the fundamental importance of past and present literature. The same does Eco in his essay On Literature. We cannot really know who we are if we do not look to the past, but it is also essential to have our eyes turned to the Future.

Article history: Received 01 June 2025; Revised 21 November 2025; Accepted 05 January 2026; Available online 30 June 2026; Available print 30 June 2026.