Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) was an Italian writer, essayist and journalist, born on 15 October 1923 in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, to an agronomist father and a botanist mother. The family returned to Sanremo, Italy, in 1925. After high school, Calvino enrolled in agriculture in Turin, but he was interested in literature, film and theatre. He read anti-fascist authors (Vittorini, Ginzburg, Pavese). In 1943, he transferred to the University of Florence, and in 1944 he joined the partisan movement and the Italian Communist Party. He graduated in literature in 1947 in Turin, where he began his career as a journalist.

His first novel, The Path to Spiders' Nests (1947), a neorealist depiction of partisan life, brought him recognition. This was followed by a collection of short stories The Last Raven Comes (1949). The trilogy Our Ancestors (1952–1959) – The Viscount Halved, The Baron Climber, The Non-Existing Knight – allegorically explores the position of the intellectual. In 1956, he published Italian Fairy Tales, a collection of folk tales. In the 1960s, he turned to experimental literature: Cosmic Comics (1965) and You with Zero (1967) combine science and fantasy. The novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If One Winter Night a Traveler (1979) are the pinnacle of postmodernism, combining narrative play and philosophical reflection. Essays such as American Lectures (1988) define literary values: lightness, speed, accuracy. He died on September 19, 1985 in Siena of a stroke.