Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino (
October 15,
1923 –
September 19,
1985) was an
Italian writer and
novelist. His best known works include
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler,
Invisible Cities and
Cosmicomics.
Born in
Santiago de Las Vegas,
Cuba, to botanists Mario Calvino and Evelina Mameli (a descendant of
Goffredo Mameli) and brother of
Floriano Calvino, a famous
geologist, Italo Calvino soon moved to his family's homeland of
Italy, where he lived most of his life.
He stayed in
Sanremo, on the
Italian Riviera, for some 20 years and enrolled in the
Avanguardisti (a
fascist youth organisation to which membership was practically compulsory) with whom he took part in the occupation of the
French Riviera. He suffered some religious troubles, his relatives being followers of the
Waldensian Protestant Church. He met
Eugenio Scalfari (later a politician and the founder of the major newspaper
La Repubblica), with whom he would remain a close friend.
In
1941 he moved to
Turin, after a long hesitation over living in this town or
Milan. He often humorously described this choice, and used to define Turin as "a city that is serious but sad."
In
1943, he joined the Partisans in the
Italian Resistance, in the
Garibaldi brigade, with the battlename of
Santiago, and with Scalfari he created the MUL (liberal universitarian movement). He then entered the (still clandestine)
Italian Communist Party.
In
1947, Calvino graduated from Turin's
university with a thesis on
Joseph Conrad and started working with the official Communist paper
L'Unità; he also had a short relationship with the
Einaudi publishing house, which put him in contact with
Norberto Bobbio,
Natalia Ginzburg,
Cesare Pavese and
Elio Vittorini. With Vittorini he wrote for the weekly
Il Politecnico (a cultural magazine associated with the university). He then left Einaudi to work mainly with L'Unità and the newborn communist weekly political magazine
Rinascita.
He worked again for the Einaudi house from
1950, as responsible for the literary volumes. The following year, presumably in order to verify a possibility of advancement in the communist party, he visited the
Soviet Union. The reports and correspondence he produced from this visit were later collected and earned him literary prizes.
In
1952 Calvino wrote with
Giorgio Bassani for
Botteghe Oscure, a magazine named after the popular name of the party's head-offices, and worked for
Il Contemporaneo, a
Marxist weekly.
In
1957 Calvino unexpectedly left the Communist party, and his letter of resignation (soon famous) was published in
L'Unità.
He found new spaces for his periodic writings in the magazines
Passato e Presente and
Italia Domani. Together with Vittorini he became a co-editor of
Il Menabò di letteratura, a position that he held for many years.
Despite the previously severe restrictions for foreigners holding communist views, he was allowed to visit the
United States, where he stayed six months (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." In the States he also met Esther Judith Singer, whom he married a few years later in
Havana, during a trip in which he visited his birthplace and met
Ernesto Che Guevara.
Back in Italy, and once again working for Einaudi, he started publishing some of his
cosmicomics in
Il Caffè, a literary magazine.
Vittorini's death in
1966 had a heavy influence on Calvino and caused him to experience what has been defined as 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".
He then started to frequent
Paris (where he was nicknamed
L'ironique amusé). Here he soon joined some important circles like the
Oulipo (
Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) and met
Roland Barthes and
Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the fermenting atmosphere that was going to evolve into
1968's cultural revolution (the
French May); in his
French experience he also became fond of
Raymond Queneau's works, which would sensibly influence his later production.
Calvino also had more intense contacts with the academic world, with notable experiences at the
Sorbonne (with Barthes) and at
Urbino's
university. His interests included classical studies (
Honoré de Balzac,
Ludovico Ariosto,
Dante,
Ignacio de Loyola,
Cervantes,
Shakespeare,
Cyrano de Bergérac,
Giacomo Leopardi) while at the same time, not without a certain surprise from the Italian intellectual circles, he wrote
novels for
Playboy's Italian edition (
1973). He became a regular contributor to the important Italian newspaper
Corriere della Sera.
In
1975 he was made Honorary Member of the
American Academy, the following year he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He visited
Japan and
Mexico and gave lectures in several American towns.
In
1981 he was awarded the prestigious French
Légion d'Honneur.
In
1985 he died in
Siena at the ancient
hospital of
Santa Maria della Scala of a
cerebral hemorrhage.
(dates are of original publication)*
The Path to the Nest of Spiders (
Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947)
*
Ultimo viene il corvo (1949)
*
I giovani del Po (1951)
*
Il cavaliere inesistente and
Il Visconte dimezzato (
The Nonexistent Knight (1951)
Il Visconte dimezzato (
The Cloven Viscount (1959)
* The Argentine Ant
(La formica argentina
, 1952)
* L'entrata in guerra
(1954)
* Italian Folktales (Fiabe Italiane
, 1956, retelling of traditional stories)
* La panchina
(1956, libretto for the opera by Sergio Liberovici)
* I racconti
(1958)
* The Baron in the Trees (Il barone rampante
, 1957)
* Our Ancestors (I nostri antenati
, 1959, collection of Il cavaliere inesistente
, Il Visconte dimezzato
and Il barone rampante
)
* Marcovaldo (1963)
* The Watcher
(La giornata di uno scrutatore
, 1963)
* La speculazione edilizia (1963)
* Cosmicomics (Cosmicomiche
, 1965)
* T Zero (Ti con zero
(1967)
* The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Il castello dei destini incrociati
, 1969)
* Difficult Loves (Gli amori difficili
, 1970, stories from the 1940s and 1950s)
* Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili
, 1972)
* Il nome, il naso
(1973)
* Autobiografia di uno spettatore
(1974)
* La corsa delle giraffe
(1975)
* The Watcher and other stories (1963, short story collection)
*
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (
Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, 1979) (English translation ISBN 0919630235)
*
The Uses of Literature (1980, 1982, essays)
*
La vera storia (1982, libretto for the opera by
Luciano Berio)
* 1983
Mr. Palomar -
Palomar*
Fantastic Stories (
Racconti Fantastici Dell'Ottocento, two volumes, 1983)
*
Science et métaphore chez Galilée (1983, lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes de la Sorbonne)
*
Collezione di sabbia (1984, essays)
Posthumous editions:
*
Under the Jaguar Sun (
Sotto il sole giaguaro, 1988, short story collection)
*
Six Memos for the Next Millennium (
Lezioni americane, 1988, lectures)
*
The Road to San Giovanni (
La strada di San Giovanni, 1990, autobiographical stories)
*
Numbers in the Dark (1993)
Italo Calvino
:I set my hand to the art of writing early on. Publishing was easy for me, and I at once found favor and understanding. But it was a long time before I realized and convinced myself that this was anything but mere chance.
Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it. (preface to
The Path to the Nest of Spiders)
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language. (
Six Memos for the Next Millennium)
Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with "bits" in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.:(
Six Memos for the Next Millennium {Lightness})
*
Italo Calvino, excerpts*
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities*
Italo Calvino's reflections on Che Guevara*
Outside the Town of Malbork*
If on a winter's night a traveler (A selection from the first chapter)
*
Cities & Eyes (from
Invisible cities)
*
Calvino on Myth*
How Much Shall We Bet? by Italo Calvino
*
In Calvino veritas - in this site,
Calvino and Chaplin*
Italo Calvino: discussion of Calvino's fantastic and quasi-fantastic works.
*
Libyrinth (sic): Italo Calvino*
Book Review of Invisible Cities on ErasmusPC, the international network for cities and culture
