Whether -or not - Italo Calvino was aware of it, Jacques Lacan’s influence permeates allof his work following the Sixties and especially informs his gaze on the twomost important women of “If on a winter’s night a traveler”: the two OtherReaders, sisters Ludmilla and Lotaria, ideally conceived as each other’sdoppelgängers. Mocking, devouring, re-writing the texts she reads, andshapeshifting constantly, the latter escapes the fetishization and voyeurismthat her sister ends up accepting; in Lotaria the Lacanian lack is not apainful loss but space for a dangerous, thriving, and creative female vitality.Hence Calvino’s implicit fear: A woman writer, how could that be?

Through Lotaria and an army of her alterslurking like ghosts in every micronovel, “If on a winter’s night a traveler”shows how the Western, masculine fear of the rising Second Wave feminismpermeated the Sixties’ intellectual milieu. Calvino’s reluctance to addresseroticism explicitly, and his strong self-construction of authorship built asort of “We don’t talk about desire!” framework. This barrier between hisunconscious and the world has been passively respected and imitated by manycritics, and precisely because of the silent code surrounding Lacan’s influenceon Calvino and his consequent narrative misogyny, we must re-read thecharacters Ludmilla and Lotaria to discover and assess this hidden, unconsciouslayer. In this paper, we will access to it through a distinctive feminist,post-Lacanian blend of semiotics and psychoanalysis mainly informed byIrigaray, Kristeva, Grosz, Zupančič.