Faculty of Design
Graphic Design
Alessandro Marchetti
Italo Calvino, 'The Path to the Nest of Spiders' Book Dust Jacket
Graphic Design
2021
In this project I designeda book dust jacket for the book The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947) by acclaimed Italian author Italo Calvino. This is one of my favourite projects to have worked on, as I got to really experiment with mixed media which is a challenge I really enjoy. The premise of the novel revolves around the life of an orphaned boy in rural Italy during the second world war. This boy seeks find acceptance by looking for validation through gritty adult friends, which he later joins as a partisan against the Nazi. I reflected the idea of the playful child looking for validation from the grounded adults as the child-like typography, made out of swirling metal wires, surrounding a large medieval-style Italian outpost, representing the adults through its sturdy and structured qualities. The materials in the piece, such as the raffia and broken glass, juxtaposed to the stone building are all semiotic of the broken rural landscape in Southern Italy during the second world war.