Italo Calvino was a part of Oulipo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo), a group of French and Italian writers and mathematicians who would purposefully invent constrained writing techniques for fun. One was that you could only use the language from McDonald's ads to tell a story. Another was an entire 300 page novel written without the letter e. They very much were having a laugh and enjoying the playfulness of language as a group.