Calvino explores the interface between the two sides of writing – the shared referential domain of lived life and the discursive artefact of the writing on the page. His fiction progresses from the first towards the second, converging with Italy's literary transformation during the 1960S. The hermetic generation of poets, dominant since the 1930S (see above, pp. 502ff.), were concerned with the metaphysics of absence, of a barely apprehensible ‘I’ and ‘thou’, and the metaphysics of language, rather than the contingency of things or events. The pressure of history – the events of the 1940S – did not immediately reverse this abstentionist stance.

Formidably austere, but also disarmingly quotidian, Eugenio Montale's wartime and post-war poems collected in the symbolically titled La bufera (‘The Storm’, 1956; see also above, p. 507) metaphysically confront the cataclysm of the Second World War. Epiphanic glimpses or ‘flashes’, they embrace the Western world from the road to Damascus as far as New England while remaining firmly anchored in Montale's war-time home, Florence, and tied to his parental Liguria. The poet's consternation links personal fates, lost loved ones, with the general fate, connecting or conflating life, death and possible after-lives or other lives. La bufera is dominated by the presences and absences of female figures, loved at once humanly and transcendentally: Clizia in the major fifth section, ‘Silvae’, and Volpe (Fox) in the sixth, ‘Madrigali privati’. These are visiting angels, apparent victims, but also stilnovo or even Christo-logical redeemers, as in ‘L'ombra della magnolia’ and in ‘Iride’ (‘Rainbow’).