Italo Calvino (English: /ˈiːtɑːlɔ kælˈviːnoʊ/; Italian: [ˈiːtalo kalˈviːno]; 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979). Lionised in Britain and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel

Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de Las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba in 1923. His father, Mario, was a tropical agronomist and botanist who also taught agriculture and floriculture. Born 47 years earlier in San Remo, Italy, Mario Calvino had emigrated to Mexico in 1909 where he took up an important position with the Ministry of Agriculture. In an autobiographical essay, Italo Calvino explained that his father “had been in his youth an anarchist, a follower of Kropotkin and then a Socialist Reformist”. In 1917, Mario left for Cuba to conduct scientific experiments, after living through the Mexican Revolution.

Returning to Cuba in 1962 Calvino met Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer (“Chichita”) and married her in 1964 in Havana, during a trip in which he visited his birthplace and other places in the island.

Early life and education.

A fan of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book as a child, Calvino felt that his early interest in stories made him the “black sheep” of a family that held literature in less esteem than the sciences. Fascinated by American movies and cartoons, he was equally attracted to drawing, poetry, and theatre. On a darker note, Calvino recalled that his earliest memory was of a socialist professor brutalized by Fascist lynch-squads. “I remember clearly that we were at dinner when the old professor came in with his face beaten up and bleeding, his bowtie all torn, asking for help.”

Other legacies include the parents’ masonic republicanism which occasionally developed into anarchic socialism. Austere, anti-Fascist freethinkers, Eva and Mario refused to give their sons any religious education.

Italo attended the English nursery school St George’s College, followed by a Protestant elementary private school run by Waldensians. His secondary schooling was completed at the state-run Liceo Gian Domenico Cassini where, at his parents’ request, he was exempted from religious instruction but forced to justify his anticonformist stance. In his mature years, Calvino described the experience as a salutary one as it made him “tolerant of others’ opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority’s beliefs”.

During this time, he met a brilliant student from Rome, Eugenio Scalfari, who went on to found the weekly magazine L’Espresso and La Repubblica, a major Italian newspaper. The two teenagers formed a lasting friendship, Calvino attributing his political awakening to their university discussions. Seated together “on a huge flat stone in the middle of a stream near our land”, he and Scalfari founded the MUL (University Liberal Movement).

Eva managed to delay her son’s enrolment in the Fascist armed scouts, the Balilla Moschettieri, and then arranged that he be excused, as a non-Catholic, from performing devotional acts in church. But later on, as a compulsory member, he could not avoid the assemblies and parades of the Avanguardisti, and was forced to participate in the Italian occupation of the French Riviera in June 1940.

World War II.

In 1947, he graduated with a Master’s thesis on Joseph Conrad, wrote short stories in his spare time, and landed a job in the publicity department at the Einaudi publishing house run by Giulio Einaudi. Although brief, his stint put him in regular contact with Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Norberto Bobbio, and many other left-wing intellectuals and writers. He then left Einaudi to work as a journalist for the official Communist daily, L’Unità, and the newborn Communist political magazine, Rinascita. During this period, Pavese and poet Alfonso Gatto were Calvino’s closest friends and mentors.

His first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders) written with valuable editorial advice from Pavese, won the Premio Riccione on publication in 1947. With sales topping 5000 copies, a surprise success in postwar Italy, the novel inaugurated Calvino’s neorealist period. In a clairvoyant essay, Pavese praised the young writer as a “squirrel of the pen” who “climbed into the trees, more for fun than fear, to observe partisan life as a fable of the forest”. In 1948, he interviewed one of his literary idols, Ernest Hemingway, travelling with Natalia Ginzburg to his home in Stresa.

Ultimo viene il corvo (The Crow Comes Last), a collection of stories based on his wartime experiences, was published to acclaim in 1949. Despite the triumph, Calvino grew increasingly worried by his inability to compose a worthy second novel. He returned to Einaudi in 1950, responsible this time for the literary volumes. He eventually became a consulting editor, a position that allowed him to hone his writing talent, discover new writers, and develop into “a reader of texts”. In late 1951, presumably to advance in the Communist Party, he spent two months in the Soviet Union as correspondent for l’Unità. While in Moscow, he learned of his father’s death on 25 October. The articles and correspondence he produced from this visit were published in 1952, winning the Saint-Vincent Prize for journalism.

Over a seven-year period, Calvino wrote three realist novels, The White Schooner (1947–1949), Youth in Turin (1950–1951), and The Queen’s Necklace (1952–54), but all were deemed defective. During the eighteen months it took to complete I giovani del Po (Youth in Turin), he made an important self-discovery: “I began doing what came most naturally to me – that is, following the memory of the things I had loved best since boyhood.

In 1952 Calvino wrote with Giorgio Bassani for Botteghe Oscure, a magazine named after the popular name of the party’s head-offices in Rome. He also worked for Il Contemporaneo, a Marxist weekly.

From 1955 to 1958 Calvino had an affair with Italian actress Elsa De Giorgi, a married, older woman. Excerpts of the hundreds of love letters Calvino wrote to her were published in the Corriere della Sera in 2004, causing some controversy.

After communism.

In 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist Party. In his letter of resignation published in L’Unità on 7 August, he explained the reason of his dissent (the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising and the revelation of Joseph Stalin’s crimes) while confirming his “confidence in the democratic perspectives” of world Communism. He withdrew from taking an active role in politics and never joined another party. Ostracized by the ICP party leader Palmiro Togliatti and his supporters on publication of Becalmed in the Antilles (La gran bonaccia delle Antille), a satirical allegory of the party’s immobilism, Calvino began writing The Baron in the Trees. Completed in three months and published in 1957, the fantasy is based on the “problem of the intellectual’s political commitment at a time of shattered illusions”. He found new outlets for his periodic writings in the journals Città aperta and Tempo presente, the magazine Passato e presente, and the weekly Italia Domani. With Vittorini in 1959, he became co-editor of Il Menabò, a cultural journal devoted to literature in the modern industrial age, a position he held until 1966.

Despite severe restrictions in the US against foreigners holding communist views, Calvino was allowed to visit the United States, where he stayed six months from 1959 to 1960 (four of which he spent in New York), after an invitation by the Ford Foundation. Calvino was particularly impressed by the “New World”: “Naturally I visited the South and also California, but I always felt a New Yorker. My city is New York.” The letters he wrote to Einaudi describing this visit to the United States were first published as “American Diary 1959–1960” in Hermit in Paris in 2003.

In 1962 Calvino was introduced to Ernesto “Che” Guevara. On 15 October 1967, a few days after Guevara’s death, Calvino wrote a tribute to him that was published in Cuba in 1968, and in Italy thirty years later. He and his wife settled in Rome in the via Monte Brianzo where their daughter, Giovanna, was born in 1965. Once again working for Einaudi, Calvino began publishing some of his “Cosmicomics” in Il Caffè, a literary magazine.

Later life and work.

Vittorini’s death in 1966 greatly affected Calvino. He went through what he called an “intellectual depression”, which the writer himself described as an important passage in his life: “…I ceased to be young. Perhaps it’s a metabolic process, something that comes with age, I’d been young for a long time, perhaps too long, suddenly I felt that I had to begin my old age, yes, old age, perhaps with the hope of prolonging it by beginning it early.”

In the fermenting atmosphere that evolved into 1968’s cultural revolution (the French May), he moved with his family to Paris in 1967, setting up home in a villa in the Square de Châtillon. Nicknamed L’ironique amusé, he was invited by Raymond Queneau in 1968 to join the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) group of experimental writers where he met Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, all of whom influenced his later production. That same year, he turned down the Viareggio Prize for Ti con zero (Time and the Hunter) on the grounds that it was an award given by “institutions emptied of meaning”. He accepted, however, both the Asti Prize and the Feltrinelli Prize for his writing in 1970 and 1972, respectively. In two autobiographical essays published in 1962 and 1970, Calvino described himself as “atheist” and his outlook as “non-religious”.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

From Invisible Cities (1974)

In 1975 Calvino was made Honorary Member of the American Academy. Awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1976, he visited Mexico, Japan, and the United States where he gave a series of lectures in several American towns. After his mother died in 1978 at the age of 92, Calvino sold Villa Meridiana, the family home in San Remo. Two years later, he moved to Rome in Piazza Campo Marzio near the Pantheon and began editing the work of Tommaso Landolfi for Rizzoli. Awarded the French Légion d’honneur in 1981, he also accepted to be jury president of the 29th Venice Film Festival.

During the summer of 1985, Calvino prepared a series of texts on literature for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures to be delivered at Harvard University in the fall. On 6 September, he was admitted to the ancient hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, where he died during the night between 18 and 19 September of a cerebral hemorrhage. His lecture notes were published posthumously in Italian in 1988 and in English as Six Memos for the Next Millennium in 1993.

His works.
Fiction.
Title Original

Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno
The Path to the Nest of Spiders
The Path to the Spiders’ Nests 1947 1957
1998 Archibald Colquhoun
Martin McLaughlin
Il visconte dimezzato
The Cloven Viscount 1952 1962 Archibald Colquhoun
La formica argentina
The Argentine Ant 1952 1957 Archibald Colquhoun
Fiabe Italiane
Italian Fables
Italian Folk Tales
Italian Folktales 1956 1961
1975
1980 Louis Brigante
Sylvia Mulcahy
George Martin
Il barone rampante
The Baron in the Trees 1957 1959 Archibald Colquhoun
La speculazione edilizia
A Plunge into Real Estate 1957 1984 D. S. Carne-Ross
Il cavaliere inesistente
The Nonexistent Knight 1959 1962 Archibald Colquhoun
La giornata d’uno scrutatore
The Watcher 1963 1971 William Weaver
Marcovaldo ovvero le stagioni in città
Marcovaldo or the Seasons in the City 1963 1983 William Weaver
La nuvola di smog
Smog 1965 1971 William Weaver
Le cosmicomiche
Cosmicomics 1965 1968 William Weaver
Ti con zero
t zero (also published as Time and the Hunter) 1967 1969 William Weaver
Il castello dei destini incrociati
The Castle of Crossed Destinies 1969 1977 William Weaver
Gli amori difficili
Difficult Loves (also the title of 2 different collections) 1970 1984 William Weaver
Le città invisibili
Invisible Cities 1972 1974 William Weaver
Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore
If on a winter’s night a traveler 1979 1981 William Weaver
Palomar
Mr. Palomar 1983 1985 William Weaver

Essays and other writings.
Title Original

Orlando Furioso di Ludovico Ariosto 1970
An interpretation of the epic poem, and selections.
Autobiografia di uno spettatore
Autobiography of a Spectator 1974 Preface to Fellini’s Quattro film.
Introduction to Faits divers de la terre et du ciel by Silvina Ocampo– 1974
With a preface by Jorge Luis Borges.
Una pietra sopra: Discorsi di letteratura e società
The Uses of Literature (also published as The Literature Machine) 1980 1986 Patrick Creagh

Essays on literature.

Racconti fantastici dell’ottocento
Fantastic Tales 1983 1997
Anthology of classic supernatural stories.
Science et métaphore chez Galilée
Science and Metaphor in Galileo Galilei 1983 – –
Lectures given at the École des hautes études in Paris.
The Written and the Unwritten Word[46] 1983 1983 William Weaver
Lecture at the New York Institute for the Humanities on 30 March 1983
Collezione di sabbia
Collection of Sand 1984
Journalistic essays from 1974–1984
Lezioni americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio
Six Memos for the Next Millennium 1988 1993 Patrick Creagh
Originally prepared for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. On the values of literature.
Sulla fiaba 1988
Essays on fables.
I libri degli altri. Lettere 1947–1981
1991 Letters that Calvino wrote to other authors, whilst he worked at Einaudi.
Perché leggere i classici
Why Read the Classics? 1991 1993 Martin McLaughlin
Essays on classic literature.

Selected filmography.

Boccaccio ’70, 1962 (co-wrote screenplay of Renzo e Luciano segment directed by Mario Monicelli)
L’Amore difficile, 1963 (wrote L’avventura di un soldato segment directed by Nino Manfredi)
Tiko and the Shark, 1964 (co-wrote screenplay directed by Folco Quilici)
Film and television adaptations[edit]
The Nonexistent Knight by Pino Zac, 1969 (Italian animated film based on the novel)
Amores dificiles by Ana Luisa Ligouri, 1983 (13′ Mexican short)
L’Aventure d’une baigneuse by Philippe Donzelot, 1991 (14′ French short based on The Adventure of a Bather in Difficult Loves )
Fantaghirò by Lamberto Bava, 1991 (TV adaptation based on Fanta-Ghirò the Beautiful in Italian Folktales)
Solidarity by Nancy Kiang, 2006 (10′ American short)
Conscience by Yu-Hsiu Camille Chen, 2009 (10′ Australian short)
“La Luna” by Enrico Casarosa, 2011 (American short)[48]

Films on Calvino.

Damian Pettigrew, Lo specchio di Calvino (Inside Italo, 2012). Co-produced by Arte France, Italy’s Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, and the National Film Board of Canada, the feature-length docufiction stars Neri Marcorè as the Italian writer and critic Pietro Citati. The film also uses in-depth conversations videotaped at Calvino’s Rome penthouse a year before his death in 1985 and rare footage from RAI, INA (Institut national de l’audiovisuel), and BBC television archives.[49] The 52-minute French version titled, Dans la peau d’Italo Calvino (“Being Italo Calvino”), was broadcast by Arte France on 19 December 2012 and Sky Arte (Italy) on 14 October 2013.[50]

Legacy.

The Scuola Italiana Italo Calvino, an Italian curriculum school in Moscow, Russia, is named after him.
Awards[edit]
1946 – L’Unità Prize (shared with Marcello Venturi) for the short story, Minefield (Campo di mine)
1947 – Riccione Prize for The Path to the Nest of Spiders
1952 – Saint-Vincent Prize
1957 – Viareggio Prize for The Baron in the Trees
1959 – Bagutta Prize
1960 – Salento Prize for Our Ancestors
1963 – International Charles Veillon Prize for The Watcher
1970 – Asti Prize
1972 – Feltrinelli Prize for Invisible Cities
1976 – Austrian State Prize for European Literature
1981 – Legion of Honour
1982 – World Fantasy Award – Life Achievement

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