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Italo Calvino (, ; ;. RAI (circa 1970), retrieved 25 October 2012. 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian novelist and short story writer. 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).
Admired in Britain, Australia and the United States, Calvino was the most translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death.McLaughlin, Italo Calvino, xii. He is buried in the garden cemetery of Castiglione della Pescaia in Tuscany.
Calvino's mother, Eva Mameli, was a botanist and university professor.Paola Govoni, "The Making of Italo Calvino: Women and Men in the ‘Two Cultures’ Home Laboratory" in Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto)Biography, Gender, and Genre, eds. P. Govoni and Z.A. Franceschi, Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht/V&R Unipress, 2014, pp. 187–221. Retrieved 4 February 2015 A native of Sassari in Sardinia and 11 years younger than her husband, she married while still a junior lecturer at Pavia University. Born into a secular family, Eva was a pacifist educated in the "religion of civic duty and science".Calvino, "Political Autobiography of a Young Man", Hermit in Paris, 132. Eva gave Italo his unusual first name to remind him of his Italian heritage, although he would eventually grow up in Italy. Calvino thought his name sounded "belligerently nationalist".Calvino, Hermit in Paris, pp. 14. Calvino described his parents as being "very different in personality from one another", suggesting perhaps deeper tensions behind a comfortable, albeit strict, middle-class upbringing devoid of conflict. As an adolescent, he found it hard to relate to poverty and the working-class, and was "ill at ease" with his parents' openness to the labourers who filed into his father's study on Saturdays to receive their weekly paycheck.Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 135.
Calvino and Floriano would climb the tree-rich estate and perch for hours on the branches reading their favourite adventure stories.Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino, 2. Less salubrious aspects of this "paternal legacy" are described in The Road to San Giovanni, Calvino's memoir of his father in which he exposes their inability to communicate: "Talking to each other was difficult. Both verbose by nature, possessed of an ocean of words, in each other's presence we became mute, would walk in silence side by side along the road to San Giovanni."Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni, 10. 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 Marxist professor who had been brutally assaulted by Benito Mussolini's Blackshirts. He said: "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 up over it, asking for help."Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 130.
Other legacies include the parents' beliefs in Freemasonry, republicanism with elements of anarchism and Marxism.McLaughlin, xii. Calvino defined his family's traditions as "a humanitarian Socialism, and before that Mazzinianism". Cf. Calvino, 'Behind the Success' in Hermit in Paris, 223. Austere freethinkers with an intense hatred of the ruling National Fascist Party, Eva and Mario also refused to give their sons any education in the Catholic Faith or any other religion.Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino, 3. Italo attended the English nursery school St George's College, followed by a Protestant elementary private school run by Waldensians. His secondary schooling, with a classical lyceum curriculum, was completed at the state-run Liceo Gian Domenico Cassini where, at his parents' request, he was exempted from religion classes but frequently asked to justify his anti-conformism to teachers, janitors, and fellow pupils.Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 133. In his mature years, Calvino described the experience as having 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".Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 134. In 1938, Eugenio Scalfari, who went on to found the weekly magazine L'Espresso and La Repubblica, a major Italian newspaper, came from Civitavecchia to join the same class though a year younger, and they shared the same desk.Sabina Minardi,'Eugenio L'Espresso 15 September 2015. 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 a university movement called the MUL. Eva managed to delay her son's enrolment in the Party's armed scouts, the Balilla Moschettieri, and then arranged that he be excused, as a non-Catholic, from performing devotional acts in Church.Calvino, "Political Autobiography of a Young Man", Hermit in Paris, 134. But later on, as a compulsory member, he could not avoid the assemblies and parades of the Avanguardisti,Calvino, 'The Duce's Portraits', Hermit in Paris, 210. and was forced to participate in the Italian invasion of the French Riviera in June 1940.
Calvino transferred to the University of Florence in 1943 and reluctantly passed three more exams in agriculture. By the end of the year, the Germans had succeeded in occupying Liguria and setting up Benito Mussolini's puppet Republic of Salò in northern Italy. Now twenty years old, Calvino refused military service and went into hiding. Reading intensely in a wide array of subjects, he also reasoned politically that, of all the partisan groupings, the communists were the best organized with "the most convincing political line".Calvino recalled this sudden, forced transformation of a dreamy adolescent into a partisan soldier as one bounded by logic since "the logic of the Resistance was the very logic of our urge towards life". Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 146.
In spring 1944, Eva encouraged her sons to enter the Italian Resistance in the name of "natural justice and family virtues".Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 142. Using the nom de guerre "Santiago", Calvino joined the Garibaldi Brigades, a clandestine Communist group and, for twenty months, endured the fighting in the Maritime Alps until 1945 and the Liberation. As a result of his refusal to be a conscript, his parents were held hostage by the Nazis for an extended period at the Villa Meridiana. Calvino wrote of his mother's ordeal that "she was an example of tenacity and courage… behaving with dignity and firmness before the SS and the Fascist militia, and in her long detention as a hostage, not least when the blackshirts three times pretended to shoot my father in front of her eyes. The historical events which mothers take part in acquire the greatness and invincibility of natural phenomena".
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.Calvino, 'Behind the Success' in Hermit in Paris, 224.
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.Critic Martin McLaughlin points out that the novel failed to win the more prestigious Premio Mondadori. McLaughlin, xiii. 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".Pavese's review first published in l'Unità on 26 September 1947. Quoted in Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino, 39. 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".Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino, 4. In late 1951, presumably to advance in the Communist Party, he spent two months in the Soviet Union as a 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.Of the three manuscripts, only Youth in Turin was published in the review Officina in 1957. Calvino's first efforts as a fictionist were marked with his experience in the Italian resistance during the Second World War, however, his acclamation as a writer of fantastic stories came in the 1950s. 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. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic."Calvino, 'Introduction by the author', Our Ancestors, vii. The result was Il visconte dimezzato (1952; The Cloven Viscount) composed in 30 days between July and September 1951. The protagonist, a seventeenth-century viscount sundered in two by a cannonball, incarnated Calvino's growing political doubts and the divisive turbulence of the Cold War.Calvino, 'Introduction by the author', Our Ancestors, x. Skilfully interweaving elements of the fable and the fantasy genres, the allegorical novel launched him as a modern "fabulist".Calvino, 'Objective Biographical Notice', Hermit in Paris, 163. In 1954, Giulio Einaudi commissioned his Fiabe italiane (1956; Italian Folktales) on the basis of the question, "Is there an Italian equivalent of the Brothers Grimm?"Calvino, 'Objective Biographical Notice', Hermit in Paris, 164. For two years, Calvino collated tales found in 19th century collections across Italy then translated 200 of the finest from various dialects into Italian. Key works he read at this time were Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale and Historical Roots of Russian Fairy Tales, stimulating his own ideas on the origin, shape and function of the story.Calvino, 'Introduction', Italian Folktales, xxvii.
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. Italian novelist's love letters turn political, International Herald Tribune, 20 August 2004
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 met Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer ("Chichita") and married her in 1964 in Havana, during a trip in which he visited his birthplace and 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 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.
Amid the atmosphere that would evolve into 1968's cultural revolution (the French May), he and his family moved to Paris in 1967, taking up residence in a villa in the . Nicknamed l'ironique amusé, Calvino was invited by Raymond Queneau in 1968 to join the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) group of experimental writers where he met Roland Barthes and Georges Perec, who would influence his later work.McLaughlin, Italo Calvino, xv. 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".Barenghi and Falcetto, 'Cronologia' in Romanzi e racconti di Italo Calvino, LXXVII 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".Cf. "Political Autobiography of a Young Man" and "Objective Biographical Notice" in Hermit in Paris, 133, 162
Calvino had more significant contact with the academic world, notably at the Sorbonne (with Barthes) and the University of Urbino. His literary interests spanned multiple periods, genres, and languages, including Honoré de Balzac, Ludovico Ariosto, Dante, Ignatius of Loyola, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Giacomo Leopardi.
Between 1972 and 1973, Calvino published two short stories, "The Name, the Nose" and the Oulipo-inspired "The Burning of the Abominable House", in the Italian edition of Playboy. He also became a regular contributor to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. During this period, Calvino spent his summer vacations in a house constructed in the pinewood of Roccamare, in Castiglione della Pescaia, Tuscany.
In 1975, Calvino was made an 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 cities. 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 the role of jury president for the 38th 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 1985, Calvino suffered a stroke in his villa in Roccamare, where he was preparing for a lecture tour of the United States. Initially hospitalized at the Misericordia hospital in Grosseto, he was transferred to the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena (now a museum). After partially regaining consciousness, his condition worsened and he died during the night of 18/19 September of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged sixty-one. He is buried in the cemetery-garden of Castiglione della Pescaia. His lecture notes were published posthumously in Italian in 1988 and in English as Six Memos for the Next Millennium in 1993.
Kai Nieminen (b. 1953) wrote his flute concerto (2001) based on the story of Mr. Palomar. The text was written to the dedicatee, Patrick Gallois.
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