Opere disperse e postume. Sotto il sole giaguaro

Released respectively in "Playboy" in November 1972 under the title The Name, the Nose; in Franco Maria Ricci's "FMR" magazine on June 1, 1982, with the title Learning to taste; in the newspaper "la Repubblica" on August 12 and 13, 1984 under the title A King Listens, the three short stories were to be part of a collection dedicated to the five senses planned by Calvino since the 1970s. The completed stories of this interrupted project converge, with some variations, in the posthumous book edited by Esther Calvino, Under the Jaguar Sun, released in May 1986 by Garzanti. The book on the five senses summarizes the last fruitful season of fiction by Calvino, which captures the paradigmatic junctures of an epochal transition, staging "a crisis that is not only individual, but involves the entire universe of literature in the transition from modern to postmodern age" (Lavagetto, 2001, p. 115).