Calvino, Ludmilla e il tema ottocentesco della lettrice

The pleasure of reading and the figure of the female reader occupy a central role in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979) by Italo Calvino. While numerous scholars—from Ferretti to Piazza—have examined the significance of reading in Calvino’s oeuvre, Ludmilla stands out not merely as the culmination of his reader-characters, but as an ironic, postmodern reimagining of the 19th-century trope of the female reader: insatiable, passive, and Bovarystic, driven by pleasure alone. On one hand, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore pushes to the extreme the self-reflective dimension introduced by the woman reader into the realist novel of the late 19th century. On the other, Calvino interrogates the cultural fascination with the 'woman who reads' in 19th-century visual and literary traditions. The female reader—as a prototype of consumption—and themes such as pleasure, passivity, identification, and the unpredictability of encountering a book, emerge as key nodes in Calvino’s meditation on the act of reading. Alongside Ludmilla, the archetypal reader, this article also considers Olivia, the protagonist of Sapore Sapere (Sotto il sole giaguaro, 1986), to explore how reading, in both characters, becomes a means of reconfiguring the binaries of active/passive and masculine/feminine, and of engaging with the otherness that exists beyond the self.