On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Italo Calvino, which took place on 15 October 1923, the Masone Labyrinth celebrates him with the exhibition CROSSED DESTINIES. Italo Calvino and Franco Maria Ricci curated by Pietro Mercogliano and Cesare Dal Pane and set up by Maddalena Casalis, an exhibition that retraces and investigates the working and personal relationship that existed between the publisher Franco Maria Ricci and the great writer Italo Calvino.

In the library of the Labirinto della Masone, which takes the name of Sala Calvino, as evidence of the friendship and esteem that bound the two protagonists, the exhibition is made up of the works in which they collaborated over the years: from book covers and of the magazines, to the original typescripts of the works signed by Italo Calvino. Alongside these, there are autographed letters, videos, photographs and documents that testify to the profound personal bond that united Ricci and Calvino in over twenty years of friendship. The prelude to the exhibition is the Codex Seraphinianus room, to which Calvino dedicated an article in the first issue of the FMR magazine, which then appeared as an introduction to the second Ricci edition of the Codex Seraphinianus, that of 1992.

It was 1969 when Franco Maria Ricci published The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino for the first time in the precious volume Tarocchi. The Visconti deck of Bergamo and New York, present in the exhibition in its first edition. In the final note to the Einaudi volume, published a few years later with the addition of the second part, La taverna dei destini crossedi, - of which an example with an autograph dedication by Calvino to Ricci is also on display - it is Calvino himself who declares that it was precisely the publisher from Parma convinced him to proceed with the publishing initiative, which he had almost given up on.

From that moment on, publisher and writer continued to collaborate in the spirit of the encounter between the word and the figurative, fundamental motifs of both careers. Ricci published other texts by Calvino: some appeared only in the magazine FMR, such as the transcription of a conference held by the writer on the occasion of an exhibition on Giorgio De Chirico at the Center Pompidou in Paris, or the story Sapore Sapere, which was then republished posthumously in collection Under the jaguar sun. Others found space both in the magazine and in a volume, such as the passage dedicated to Luigi Serafini's fantastic encyclopedia, the Codex Seraphinianus, which opens the exhibition in the dedicated room of the Labirinto della Masone, or the text Il silence e le città, published with accompanying paintings by the nineteenth-century Florentine painter Fabio Borbottoni. Four wonderful passages of clear ekphrastic prose accompany the large canvases of the painter Domenico Gnoli, in the volume of the series "The Signs of Man" dedicated to his work. The original typescripts signed by the author are exhibited for the piece on Borbottoni and that on Gnoli together with the first volume editions.