211   Jenny WeBB Fantastic Desire Poe, Calvino, and the Dying Woman In the production of the anthology entitled Racconti fantastici dell’Ottocento (1983) compiled shortly before his death, Italo Calvino ofers an interesting insight into the authors he valued. In light of his composition of this anthology, it is tempting to reread Calvino’s own literary oeuvre for traces of those texts that he saw it to an- thologize. In fact, Calvino points us in this very direction when in the introduction to his anthology he makes an intriguing observation regarding Edgar Allan Poe: “If in the majority of cases, the Romantic imagination creates around itself a space populated by visionary apparitions, there also exists the fantastic story in which the supernatural is invisible. Rather than seeing it, we feel it. [. . .] We can ind the clearest examples of these two directions in Poe” (xii). In Calvino’s Racconti fantas- tici, Poe emerges with considerable thematic weight, for as Calvino discusses these directions in Poe’s texts, we ind echoes that concretely return us to Calvino him- self. he “typical . . . dead woman” and the “tension concentrat[ed] in the . . . mono- logue,” while patently Poe, are also commonly Calvino. he textual connection between Poe and Calvino at irst appears as a formal overlap. Both authors composed short stories that have proved diicult to cate- gorize, but ofer some version of the fantastic. Moreover, each author has created works that present themselves as both narrative as well as “inner” or philosophical constructions. For these reasons alone, the thematic links between their work de- serves closer consideration. Speciically, both Poe and Calvino return again and again to texts that center around a lost lover, a dying woman, and a fantastic desire. By examining this connection in greater detail, I hope to provide a further example of Poe’s inluence on twentieth-century literature. While both Poe and Calvino have produced a wide variety of texts dealing with the thematic structures under consideration it is, perhaps, most productive to limit our analysis to their short stories. I begin my discussion with Calvino in order to provide an appropriate com- parative context for an investigation of Poe. he various short stories found in Le cosmicomiche (1965) illustrate Calvino’s concern with an aesthetic desire. his volume presents us with a delightful collec- tion of “how so” stories on the various scientiic theories regarding the creation of the universe. Dinosaurs are forgotten and unrecognized as they wander onto train