The Path to the Nest of Spiders by Italo Calvino

First published:Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947 (English translation, 1956)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1944

Locale: An unnamed town and the surrounding countryside, on the coast of Liguria in the northwest portion of the Italian peninsula

Principal Characters:

• Pin, a teenage boy
• Rina, (the Dark Girl of Long Alley), his older sister
• Red Wolf, a young Communist partisan
• Cousin, a member of a partisan band

The Novel

It is Italy in the year 1944: The Germans are locked in combat with the Allied forces advancing from the south, while the countryside is roamed by partisan bands, ambushing German convoys and disrupting their supply lines. Overhead, Allied bombers pass by on their way to the destruction of cities and factories, while at sea the low, dark shapes of warships patrol the coasts.

The convulsion of a world at war is lost on Pin, a young, foulmouthed urchin who is both precocious in worldly ways and almost touchingly naive. He smokes, cadges drinks from men in the local bar, sings them dirty songs and tells them filthy jokes to win their approval, but despises them so thoroughly that he inevitably turns on them with his cruel, accurate wit. The men turn on him with their fists and boots and kick him out into the street. For Pin,however, adults are his only companions; he cannot get along with boys his own age.

Pin lives with his sister, Rina, who is known as the Dark Girl of Long Alley. Rina’s current boyfriend is a young German sailor; there have been many others, and Pin contemptuously dismisses his sister as a whore. Their mother is dead and their father has deserted them.

Pin is plunged into the complexity of the war through accident, almost on a dare. The drinkers in the bar become excited when a partisan recruiter passes through town, and, although their commitment is limited to some loud and indiscreet talk, they convince Pin to steal a pistol from Rina’s German sailor. Pin takes the weapon when the two are making love, but instead of turning it over to the men he buries it at his secret place, a stretch of grassy riverbank where spiders build their nests.

On his way home, Pin is arrested, beaten during interrogation, and lodged in a former English villa that is now a prison. There he meets Red Wolf, the legendary young Communist partisan. Even Pin, who is indifferent to the war, has heard of this young bridge destroyer and Nazi fighter. Perhaps, Pin thinks, he has at last met someone with whom to share the secret of the spiders’ nests. Red Wolf and Pin escape, but before Pin can reveal his treasure the two are separated.

Pin meets Cousin, another partisan, who takes Pin with him to his detachment. It is a ragged group, a combination of misfits, and the partisan commanders always station it far from actual fighting during battles. Pin finds these adults no better than the wine drinkers back home. As he follows them he resumes his old behavior, mocking the men with his coarse, uncomfortably accurate jokes, while watching them narrowly for any signs of weakness or fault. Only Cousin, who, like Pin, expresses contempt and scorn for women, wins his approval. Finally, disgusted beyond endurance, he leaves the band to return home.

Pin finds that his sister is now the mistress of a German officer; nothing has changed at home, so he leaves. Down by the river he searches for the hidden pistol among the nests of spiders. Throughout his adventures he has often thought of it and feared that others might have found it. At last, he unearths it. Cousin comes along and Pin shows him the spiders’ hidden homes. As the book ends, the two go off together across the fields.

The Characters

The central character of The Path to the Nest of Spiders is Pin. All the other characters and events of the novel are filtered through his perceptions. These perceptions are skewed, however, because of Pin’s situation and personality. Living without a father or mother, and with a sister whose morals are distinctly casual, has hardened and coarsened Pin. Beyond this, Pin seems to be suffering from severe anxieties relating to sexuality; partly, no doubt, these stem from his own developing sexual nature, but the severity and depth of his condition often seem much more than can be attributed to adolescent uncertainty.

Pin is well acquainted with the mechanical aspects of human sexuality; during the escape with Red Wolf he irks the young Communist by drawing obscene pictures on the side of a wall, instead of the proletarian propaganda Red Wolf expects. Elsewhere in the novel, Pin is able to score cruel and ac-curate hits on others with his jokes and songs aimed at their sexual foibles or frailties. He clearly has a thorough, if gutter-level, education in the topic of sex.

Yet the relationships between men and women baffle him. He cannot understand why the two desire each other, and this ignorance leads to fear and a vibrant hatred of females. The main appeal of the young partisan known as Cousin is that he, too, scorns women. Cousin wastes no occasion to disparage women, and at one point concisely states his philosophy to Pin: “Of course, behind all the stories with a bad ending there’s always a woman, make no mistake about that. You’re young, just listen to what I tell you. War’s all due to women....” It is little wonder, then, that Pin is drawn to Cousin, the only person to whom he can show the nests of spiders. Still, Cousin is flawed, just as Pin is, and the novel leaves unresolved their future development.

Within the world of Italo Calvino’s novel, all characters are flawed. There are obvious moral failings, such as those of Pin’s sister, Rina, and there are other, more ambiguous faults, which are somehow darkly connected with sex. Dritto, the commander of the inept partisan unit, seems an excellent leader in his potential but continually wastes opportunities in combat and destroys his reputation with the higher command. During the climactic battle toward the end of the book, Dritto renounces his command to Cousin and remains behind to make love with the young wife of the unit’s cook. Pin, who has stayed behind to spy on the couple, receives fresh confirmation that the sexual bond between man and women is a base and destroying union, rather than a loving and creative one.

Other motives fare no better in the bleak view of the boy. Red Wolf, who entered Pin’s life as a shining hero, proves to be a humorless, doctrinaire Communist, who finds all of his answers in the Party line. At one point he dismisses another character as a “Trotskyist,” explaining the word to Pin by quoting the title of a work by Vladimir Ilich Lenin: “Left-wing Communism, an infantile disorder.”

The boozy drinkers in the town bar, the misfits of the partisan band, the brutal but inefficient members of the Fascist guards, all of these are flawed and lacking. Some of this is a result of the novel’s setting in wartime Italy, where human nature is degraded by circumstance and condition. More of it, however, comes from the view of the world as seen by Pin, a deeply troubled young boy.

Critical Context

The Path to the Nest of Spiders was Italo Calvino’s first novel and was published in 1947, only two years after the end of the war. In a sense, the book is a literary counterpart to Vittorio De Sica’s film Ladri di biciclette (1948; The Bicycle Thief), which also probes the ravaged, precarious lives of the common men and women in war-torn Italy. Both works, the novel and the film, present life in gritty, uncompromising terms and focus on the fundamental passions which govern human life. Life, they say, is a struggle for sex or bread, a battle in the hills between Fascists and partisans or between the poor and homeless in the streets.

On the surface, then, The Path to the Nest of Spiders would seem to be pure neorealism, a bleak and unblinking depiction of the harsh truth of Italy during World War II. Boys join the Fascists so they can carry machine guns; women sleep with German sailors and officers to have ersatz chocolate and jam to eat; and the partisans, far from being the sterling heroes of myth, are a ragtag collection of misfits, parroting Communists, and confused youths.

This work stands in marked contrast to Calvino’s other writings. There is little humor and no fantasy in this book, while both of these elements are essential qualities of his more mature efforts such as Le cosmicomiche (1965; Cosmicomics, 1968), Ti con zero (1967; T Zero, 1969), or the lyrical, enchanting Le citta invisibili (1972; Invisible Cities, 1974). In this first novel, Calvino sketches a solid, earthy and earthbound narrative, one that is grounded firmly in the sordid reality of a war’s unraveling and a young boy’s sexual awakening.

Still, there are touches which reveal the Calvino to come. The choice of the spiders’ nests as a critical, central symbol, and the deft, almost poetic description of those nests, is an indication of the neorealistic, nonliteral tendencies which would become more prominent as Calvino’s career progressed.

On the one hand, it is clear that to Pin the nests are a secret, a talisman whose revelation to another is the only certain test of comradeship in an otherwise unfriendly and untrustworthy world. On the other hand, the intricate, almost magical nature of the nests, with their woven round doors on gossamer hinges, hints at a reality beyond the mundane. In the books which followed this first novel, Italo Calvino steadily moved away from the realm of mere realism to that of the enchanted symbol.

Bibliography

Andrews, Richard. “Italo Calvino,” in Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy: A Collection of Essays, 1984. Edited by Michael Caesar and Peter Hainsworth.

Calvino, Italo. The Uses of Literature, 1986.

Carter, Albert Howard. Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy, 1987.

Olken, I.T. With Pleated Eye and Garnet Wing: Symmetries of Italo Calvino, 1984.