Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies stands out in the literary landscape as a work steeped in fantasy, yet it transcends typical genre conventions by intertwining elements of semiotics. In this novel, Calvino creatively employs tarot cards as the primary medium for storytelling, eschewing spoken language in favor of visual and gestural communication. This choice illustrates Calvino's lifelong fascination with nonverbal signs and underlines the novel's narrative structure, where characters rely on a series of tarot cards to convey their stories. Words, being merely conventional signs, are absent, placing emphasis on the evocative power of images and gestures.

The novel's innovative approach stems from Calvino's challenge to himself: crafting a narrative using two distinct sets of tarot cards. The castle narratives draw inspiration from a fifteenth-century set by Bonifacio Bembo, while the tavern stories utilize a larger, more complete eighteenth-century deck from Marseilles, France. Calvino's effort to demonstrate the feasibility of such a narrative is evidenced by the castle section's initial publication in Tarocchi: Il mazzo visconteo di Bergamo e New York in 1969.

This exploration of semiotic fantasy also echoes through Calvino's broader body of work, including Le cosmicomiche (1965) and Le citta invisibili (1972), where themes of signification and abstract storytelling are prevalent. Similarly, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979) delves into these concepts, aligning Calvino with other literary figures intrigued by semiotics, such as Umberto Eco. Eco's Il nome della rosa (1980) incorporates semiotic theory into the mystery genre, suggesting a shared intellectual curiosity between the two authors.

Roland Barthes, a French semiologist, encapsulated this fascination with signs by asserting that "everything signifies," where every gesture and word possesses a depth of meaning beyond their apparent simplicity. Calvino’s work magnifies this communication process, underscoring the inherent ambiguities and uncertainties faced by those who engage with it. Through his semiotic fantasy, Calvino captures the essence of human communication, not only as a tool for storytelling but also as a reflection of the complexities and intricacies of human interaction.