HN is emphatically for more than "tech news", and an essay by Italo Calvino about movies is certainly on-topic here. Indeed, we need more such posts—not Calvino essays or stories about movies, necessarily, but articles on everything under the sun.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html