Italo Calvino: Biography from Answers.com

One of modern Italy's most important men of letters, Italo Calvino (1923-1985), blended fantasy, fable, and comedy in an effort to illuminate modern life, and in the process redefined the literary forms.

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923. His father, Mario, a botanist, was 48 when Calvino was born; his mother, formerly Eva Mameli, also a botanist, was 37. Shortly after his birth, his family returned to their native Italy. They raised Calvino on their farm in San Remo, and Mario taught at the nearby University of Turin. The lush vegetation of the San Remo area and his extensive knowledge of local flora are reflected in many of Calvino's writings.

After preparatory school, Calvino enrolled in the Faculty of Science at the University of Turin. However, soon after his matriculation, Calvino received orders to join the Italian Army. He promptly fled to the hills and joined the resistance. During the two years that Germany occupied Italy (1943-1945) Calvino lived as a partisan in the woods of the Alpi Maritime region fighting both German and Italian fascists.

At the war's end in 1945, Calvino joined the Communist Party. He also returned to the university; however, this time he enrolled in the Faculty of Letters. He began writing for left-wing papers and journals. Calvino also began to record his war experiences in stories that eventually became his highly acclaimed first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947). Here he revealed the war as seen through the eyes of an innocent young soldier, the first of many youthful and/or naive protagonists he used to reflect life's complexity and tragedy. Considered a member of the school of neo-Realism, Calvino was encouraged to write another novel in this tradition by his literary friends, particularly writers Natalia Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese. They also invited him to join the staff of their new publishing house, Enaudi. He accepted and remained affiliated with Enaudi all his life.

However, Calvino's next books were very different. In The Cloven Viscount (1952) Calvino depicts a soldier halved by a cannonball during a crusade. His two halves return to play opposing roles in his native village. The Nonexistent Knight (1959) details the adventures of a suit of armor occupied by the will of a knight who is otherwise incorporeal. And The Baron in the Trees (1957) recounts the saga of a boy who, rebelling against the authority of his father, spends the rest of his life living in the branches of a forest. All three works, set in remote times, rely on fantasy, fable, and comedy to illuminate modern life.

By the middle of the 1950s Calvino spent most of his time in Rome, the literary as well as political hub of Italian life. He resigned from the Communist Party, tired of writing tracts for Communist periodicals and disillusioned by the spread of dogmatic Stalinism and the savage crushing of the Hungarian revolt of 1956. As the years passed, Calvino became increasingly skeptical of politics.

Publication of Italian Folktales in 1956 did much to ensure Calvino's reputation as a major literary figure. Calvino compiled a complete and authoritative collection of 200 folk tales from all regions and dialects of Italy. Critics rank this anthology along with that of the Brothers Grimm in importance and appeal.

In 1959 Calvino visited America for six months, and in the early 1960s he moved to Paris. The Watcher, a collection of three short stories, was published in 1963. While living in Paris he met Chichita Singer, an Argentinian woman who had been working for years as a translator for UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). They were married in 1964.

In his writing Calvino continued to "search for new forms to suit realities ignored by most writers." In the comic strip he found the inspiration for both t-zero (1967) and Cosmicomics (1968). In these pieces, which resemble science fiction, a blob-like being named Qfwfq narrates the astronomical origins of the cosmos as well as the development of the species over millenia.

The 1970s saw the publication of Invisible Cities (1972), the story of Marco Polo's voyage from Venice to Cathay, including descriptions of many fictionalized cities; The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), which is organized around the imagery of medieval Tarot cards; and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979). This last work consists of ten unfinished novels within a novel which is itself a wild romp through the worlds of academia, publishing, and criticism.

It was also during the 1970s in Paris that Calvino became a member of "the workshop for potential literature," a group of scholars and writers who met monthly to explore the possibilities of modern literature. During this period he and Chichita became the parents of a daughter whom they named Giovana.

Calvino returned to Rome in 1980. He and his family also enjoyed a country house at Pinetta Rocca Mare near the Riviera. In 1983 Mr. Palomar was completed. Calvino turned this novel into a dramatization of a mathematical formula categorizing the actions of the title character, named for the famous observatory, at a seaside resort. The book is at once a highly comic and abstract allegory.

During these years Calvino visited the United States again. In 1975 he became an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1980 Italian Folktales was included on the American Library Association's Notable Booklist; in 1984 he was awarded an honorary degree by Mount Holyoke College; and in 1985 he was to have delivered the Norton Lectures at Harvard. However, Calvino died at 61 on September 19, 1985, in Siena, Italy, following a cerebral hemorrhage.

Italo Calvino redefined the literary forms and in so doing breathed new life into the novel, the fable, and the folktale.

Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino, on the cover of Lezioni americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio
Born	15 October 1923(1923-10-15) Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba
Died	19 September 1985 (aged 61) Siena, Italy
Occupation	journalist, short story writer, novelist, essayist
Nationality	Italian
Literary movement	Postmodernism
Notable work(s)	The Baron in the Trees Invisible Cities If on a winter's night a traveler Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Influences Ludovico Ariosto, Samuel Beckett, Ambrose Bierce, Jorge Luis Borges, Galileo Galilei, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Cesare Pavese, Georges Perec, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Queneau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Voltaire

Influenced Aimee Bender, Umberto Eco, Amanda Filipacchi, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie

Biography

Cuba

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.^[2] 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".^[3] In 1917, Mario left for Cuba to conduct scientific experiments, after living through the Mexican Revolution.

Calvino's mother, Eva Mameli, was a botanist and university professor. A native of Sassari in Sardinia and 11 years younger than her husband, she married while she was 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".^[4] Calvino described his parents as being "very different in personality from one another",^[3] suggesting perhaps deeper tensions behind a comfortable, albeit strict, middle-class upbringing devoid of conflict. As an adolescent, he found it hard relating to poverty and the working-class, and was "ill at ease" with his parents’ openness to the laborers who filed into his father's study on Saturdays to receive their weekly paycheck.^[5]

Early life and education

In 1925, less than two years after Calvino's birth, the family returned to Italy and settled definitively in San Remo on the Ligurian coast. Floriano, Calvino's brother who became a distinguished geologist, was born in 1927.

The family divided their time between the Villa Meridiana, an experimental floriculture station which also served as their home, and Mario's ancestral land at San Giovanni Battista. On this small working farm set in the hills behind San Remo, Mario pioneered in the cultivation of then exotic fruits such as avocado and grapefruit, eventually obtaining an entry in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani for his achievements. The vast forests and luxuriant fauna omnipresent in Calvino's early fiction such as The Baron in the Trees derives from this "legacy". In an interview, Calvino stated that "San Remo continues to pop out in my books, in the most diverse pieces of writing."^[6] He and Floriano would climb the tree-rich estate and perch for hours on the branches reading their favorite adventure stories.^[7] 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."^[8] Due to his early interest in stories, having devoured Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book as a child, Calvino felt he was 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."^[9]

Other legacies include the parents’ masonic republicanism which occasionally developed into anarchic socialism.^[10] Austere, anti-Fascist freethinkers, Eva and Mario refused giving their sons any religious education.^[11] 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”.^[12] 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, Italy's major 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",^[9] 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.^[13] But later on, as a compulsory member, he could not avoid the assemblies and parades of the Avanguardisti,^[14] and was forced to participate in the Italian occupation of the French Riviera in June 1940.^[15]

World War II

In 1941, Calvino dutifully enrolled at the University of Turin, choosing the Agriculture Faculty where his father had previously taught courses in agronomy. Concealing his literary ambitions to please his family, he passed four exams in his first year while reading anti-Fascist works by Elio Vittorini, Eugenio Montale, Cesare Pavese, Huizinga, and Pisacane, and works by Max Planck, Heisenberg, and Einstein on physics.^[16] Disdainful of Turin students, Calvino saw himself as enclosed in a "provincial shell"^[17] that offered the illusion of immunity from the Fascist nightmare: "We were ‘hard guys’ from the provinces, hunters, snooker-players, show-offs, proud of our lack of intellectual sophistication, contemptuous of any patriotic or military rhetoric, coarse in our speech, regulars in the brothels, dismissive of any romantic sentiment and desperately devoid of women."^[17]

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".^[18]

In spring 1944, Eva encouraged her sons to enter the Italian Resistance in the name of "natural justice and family virtues".^[19] Using the battlename of "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."^[20]

Turin and communism

Calvino settled in Turin in 1945, after a long hesitation over living there or in Milan.^[21] He often humorously belittled this choice, describing Turin as a "city that is serious but sad". Returning to university, he abandoned Agriculture for the Arts Faculty. A year later, he was initiated into the literary world by Elio Vittorini who published his short story Andato al commando (1945; Gone to Headquarters) in Il Politecnico, a Turin-based weekly magazine associated with the university.^[22] The horror of the war had not only provided the raw material for his literary ambitions but deepened his commitment to the Communist cause. Viewing civilian life as a continuation of the partisan struggle, he confirmed his membership of the Italian Communist Party. On reading Lenin's State and Revolution, he plunged into post-war political life, associating himself chiefly with the worker's movement in Turin.^[23]

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.^[24]

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.^[25] 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".^[26] In 1948, he interviewed one of his literary idols, Ernest Hemingway, traveling with Natalia Ginzberg 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".^[27] 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 (1947-49), Youth in Turin (1950-51), and The Queen's Necklace (1952-54), but all were deemed defective.^[28] During the eighteen months it took to complete I giovanni 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."^[29] 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.^[30] Skillfully interweaving elements of the fable and the fantasy genres, the allegorical novel launched him as a modern "fabulist".^[31] 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?"^[32] 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.^[33]

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

From 1955 to 1958 Calvino had an affair with the actress Elsa de' Giorgi, an older and married woman. Calvino wrote hundreds of love letters to her. Excerpts were published by Corriere della Sera in 2004, causing some controversy.^[34]

After communism

In 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist party. His letter of resignation was published in L'Unità and soon became famous. He found new outlets 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 which Calvino held for many years.

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 the book Hermit in Paris in 2003.

In 1962 Calvino met the Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer (Chichita) and married her in 1964 in Havana, during a trip in which he visited his birthplace and met Ernesto Che Guevara. This encounter later led him to contribute an article on 15 October 1967, a few days after the death of Guevara, describing the lasting impression Guevara made on him. Back in Italy, and once again working for Einaudi, Calvino started 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 where he was nicknamed L'ironique amusé. Invited by Raymond Queneau to join the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) group of experimental writers, he met Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, all of whom influenced his later production.^[35]

Calvino 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 Bergerac, and Giacomo Leopardi. At the same time, not without surprising Italian intellectual circles, Calvino wrote novels for Playboy's Italian edition (1973). He became a regular contributor to the important Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

In 1975 Calvino was made Honorary Member of the American Academy, and 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 French Légion d'honneur.

During the summer of 1985, Calvino prepared some notes for a series of lectures to be delivered at Harvard University in the fall. However, on 6 September, he was admitted to the ancient hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, where he died during the night between the 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.

Style

His style is not easily classified; much of his writing has an air of the fantastic reminiscent of fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."

Authors he helped publish

Selected bibliography

Fiction

Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947 / The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1957
Ultimo viene il corvo / The Crow Comes Last, 1949
Il visconte dimezzato, 1952 / The Cloven Viscount, 1962
La formica argentina, 1952
Fiabe Italiane, 1956 / Italian Folktales, 1961, 1975, 1980
Il barone rampante, 1957 / The Baron in the Trees, 1959
La speculazione edilizia, 1957 / A Plunge into Real Estate, 1984 (in Difficult Loves)
I racconti, 1958
Il cavaliere inesistente, 1959 / The Nonexistent Knight, 1962
I nostri antenati, 1960 / Our Ancestors, 1962
La giornata d'uno scrutatore, 1963 / The Watcher and Other Stories, 1971
Marcovaldo ovvero le stagioni in città, 1963 / Marcovaldo or the Seasons in the City, 1983
La nuvola di smog e La formica argentina, 1965 / Smog and The Argentine Ant, 1971 (in the Watcher and Other Stories)
Cosmicomiche, 1965 / Cosmicomics, 1968
Ti con zero, 1967 / t zero, 1969 (also published as Time and the Hunter, 1970)
Il castello dei destini incrociati, 1969 / The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1979
Gli amori difficili, 1970 / Difficult Loves, 1984
Le città invisibili, 1972 / Invisible Cities, 1974
Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, 1979 / If on a winter's night a traveler, 1981
Palomar, 1983 / Mr. Palomar, 1985
Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove, 1984
Sotto il sole giaguaro, 1986 / Under the Jaguar Sun, 1988
Prima che tu dica 'Pronto', 1993 / Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, 1996

Essays and other writings

Orlando furioso di Ludovico Ariosto, 1970 (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 (preface by Jorge Luis Borges), Gallimard, 1974
Una pietra sopra: Discorsi di letteratura e società, 1980 / The Uses of Literature, 1986 (published in Britain as The Literature Machine, 1987)
Racconti fantastici dell'ottocento, 1983 / Fantastic Tales, 1997 (anthology of classic supernatural stories)
Science et métaphore chez Galilée / (Science and Metaphor in Galileo Galilei), 1983 (lectures given at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes de la Sorbonne in Paris)
The Written and the Unwritten Word, 1983 (first published in the New York Review of Books)
Collezione di sabbia / Collection of Sand, 1984 (journalistic essays from 1974-84)
Lezioni americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio, 1988 / Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1993
Sulla fiaba, 1988
I libri degli altri. Lettere 1947-1981, 1991 (letters to writers)
Perché leggere i classici, 1991 / Why Read the Classics?, 1993

Autobiographical works

L'entrata in guerra, 1954
La strada di San Giovanni, 1990 / The Road to San Giovanni, 1993
Ermita a Parigi. Pagine autobiografiche, 1994 / Hermit in Paris, 2003
Album Calvino, 1995

Libretti

La panchina. Opera in un atto (The Bench: One-Act Opera), 1956 (libretto for the opera by Sergio Liberovici)
La vera storia, 1982 (libretto for the opera by Luciano Berio)
Un re in ascolto (A King Listens), 1984 (libretto for the opera by Luciano Berio)

Translations

I fiori blu, 1967 (The Blue Flowers by Raymond Queneau)
La canzone del polistirene, 1985 (Styrène's Song by Raymond Queneau)

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

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)

Awards

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
1959 - Bagutta Prize
1960 - Salento Prize for Our Ancestors
1963 - Veillon Prize
1973 - Feltrinelli Prize for Invisible Cities
1976 - Austrian State Prize for European Literature
1981 - Legion of Honour
1982 - Nice Festival Prize

Films on Calvino

Damian Pettigrew, Calvino Cosmorama (ARTE France, National Film Board of Canada, 2009). At his home in Piazza Campo Marzio (Rome) in 1983, Calvino granted a series of filmed interviews on his work to Canadian director Damian Pettigrew. The transcripts were published in The Paris Review in 1992, in La Repubblica in 1995, and in book form in Italy under the title, Uno scrittore pomeridiano in 2003. The videos now serve as the basis of a major documentary which features rare archival footage, unpublished documents and photographs, and a unique recording of Calvino reading from his last novel, Mr. Palomar.

Sources

Print

Primary sources

Calvino, Italo. Adam, One Afternoon (trans. Archibald Colquhoun, Peggy Wright). London: Minerva, 1992.
—. The Castle of Crossed Destinies (trans. William Weaver). London: Secker & Warburg, 1977
—. Cosmicomics (trans. William Weaver). London: Picador, 1993.
—. The Crow Comes Last (Ultimo viene il corvo). Turin: Einaudi, 1949.
—. Difficult Loves. Smog. A Plunge into Real Estate (trans. William Weaver, Donald Selwyn Carne-Ross). London: Picador, 1985.
—. Hermit in Paris (trans. Martin McLaughlin). London: Jonathan Cape, 2003.
—. If on a winter's night a traveller (trans. William Weaver). London: Vintage, 1998. ISBN 0-919630-23-5
—. Invisible Cities (trans. William Weaver). London: Secker & Warburg, 1974.
—. Italian Fables (trans. Louis Brigante). New York: Collier, 1961. (50 tales)
—. Italian Folk Tales (trans. Sylvia Mulcahy). London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1975. (24 tales)
—. Italian Folktales (trans. George Martin). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. (complete 200 tales)
—. Marcovaldo or the Seasons in the City (trans. William Weaver). London: Minerva, 1993.
—. Mr. Palomar (trans. William Weaver). London: Vintage, 1999.
—. Our Ancestors (trans. A. Colquhoun). London: Vintage, 1998.
—. The Path to the Nest of Spiders (trans. Archibald Colquhoun). Boston: Beacon, 1957.
—. The Path to the Spiders' Nests (trans. A. Colquhoun, revised by Martin McLaughlin). London: Jonathan Cape, 1993.
—. t zero (trans. William Weaver). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969.
—. The Road to San Giovanni (trans. Tim Parks). New York: Vintage International, 1993.
—. Six Memos for the Next Millennium (trans. Patrick Creagh). New York: Vintage International, 1993.
—. The Watcher and Other Stories (trans. William Weaver). New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1971.

Secondary sources

Bernardini Napoletano, Francesca. I segni nuovi di Italo Calvino. Rome: Bulzoni, 1977.
Bonura, Giuseppe. Invito alla lettura di Calvino. Milan: U. Mursia, 1972.
Calvino, Italo. Uno scrittore pomeridiano: Intervista sull'arte della narrativa a cura di William Weaver e Damian Pettigrew con un ricordo di Pietro Citati. Rome: minimum fax, 2003.
Corti, Maria. 'Intervista: Italo Calvino' in Autografo 2 (October 1985): 51.
Di Carlo, Franco. Come leggere I nostri antenati. Milan: U. Mursia, 1958.
McLaughlin, Martin. Italo Calvino. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
Weiss, Beno. Understanding Italo Calvino. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

Online

Italo Calvino at Emory University Online Resources and Links
Outside the Town of Malbork A Site for Italo Calvino
Calvino on Che Guevara

References

^ McLaughlin, Italo Calvino, xii.
^ Calvino, ‘Objective Biographical Notice’, Hermit in Paris, 160.
^ ^a ^b Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 132.
^ Calvino, "Political Autobiography of a Young Man", Hermit in Paris, 132.
^ Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 135.
^ Corti, Autografo 2 (October 1985): 51.
^ Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino, 2.
^ Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni, 10.
^ ^a ^b Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 130.
^ 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.
^ Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino, 3.
^ Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 134.
^ Calvino, "Political Autobiography of a Young Man", Hermit in Paris, 134.
^ Calvino, 'The Duce's Portraits', Hermit in Paris, 210.
^ Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino, 3.
^ Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 140.
^ ^a ^b Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 138.
^ 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.
^ Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 142.
^ Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 142.
^ The decision was influenced by the firmly anti-Fascist stance of Turin during Mussolini's years in power. Cf. Calvino, 'Behind the Success' in Hermit in Paris, 225.
^ Il Politecnico was founded by Elio Vittorini, a novelist and the leading leftist intellectual of postwar Italy, who saw it as a means to restore Italy's diminished standing within the European cultural mainstream. Cf. Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino, 3.
^ Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 143.
^ Calvino, 'Behind the Success' in Hermit in Paris, 224.
^ Critic Martin McLaughlin points out that the novel failed to win the more prestigious Premio Mondadori. McLaughlin, xiii.
^ Pavese's review first published in l'Unità on 26 September 1947. Quoted in Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino, 39.
^ Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino, 4.
^ Of the three manuscripts, only Youth in Turin was published in the review Officina in 1957.
^ Calvino, 'Introduction by the author', Our Ancestors, vii.
^ Calvino, ‘Introduction by the author’, Our Ancestors, x.
^ Calvino, ‘Objective Biographical Notice’, Hermit in Paris, 163.
^ Calvino, 'Objective Biographical Notice', Hermit in Paris, 164.
^ Calvino, 'Introduction', Italian Folktales, xxvii.
^ Italian novelist's love letters turn political, International Herald Tribune, 20 August 2004
^ McLaughlin, Italo Calvino, xv.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities interpreted by Colleen Corradi Brannigan
Italo Calvino at Emory University On-Line Resources and Links
Outside the Town of Malbork A Site for Italo Calvino

Excerpts and essays

If on a winter's night a traveler First chapter excerpts
How Much Shall We Bet? Chapter 8 of Cosmicomics
Calvino on Myth
Calvino on Che Guevara
In Calvino veritas Essays on Calvino

Bagutta Prize winning authors

Giovan Battista Angioletti (1927) · Giovanni Comisso (1928) · Vincenzo Cardarelli (1929) · Gino Rocca (1930) · Giovanni Titta Rosa (1931) · Leonida Rèpaci (1932) · Raul Radice (1933) · Carlo Emilio Gadda (1934) · Enrico Sacchetti (1935) · Silvio Negro (1936) · Dario Ortolani (1947) · Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini (1948) · Giulio Confalonieri (1949) · Vitaliano Brancati (1950) · Indro Montanelli (1951) · Francesco Serantini (1952) · Leonardo Borghese (1953) · Giuseppe Marotta (1954) · Alfonso Gatto (1955) · Giuseppe Lanza (1956) · Pier Angelo Soldini (1957) · Lorenzo Montano (1958) · Italo Calvino (1959) · Enrico Emanuelli (1960) · Giorgio Vigolo (1961) · Giuseppe Dessì (1962) · Ottiero Ottieri (1963) · Tommaso Landolfi (1964) · Biagio Marin (1965) · Manlio Cancogni (1966) · Primo Levi (1967) · Piero Chiara (1968) · Niccolò Tucci (1969) · Alberto Vigevani (1970) · Pietro Gadda Conti (1971) · Anna Banti (1972) · Sergio Solmi (1973) · Gianni Celati (1974) · Enzo Forcella (1975) · Mario Soldati (1976) · Sandro Penna (1977) · Carlo Cassola (1878) · Mario Rigoni Stern (1979) · Giovanni Macchia (1980) · Pietro Citati (1981) · Vittorio Sereni (1982) · Giorgio Bassani (1983) · Natalia Ginzburg (1984) · Francesca Duranti (1985) · Leonardo Sciascia (1986) · Claudio Magris (1987) · Luciano Erba (1988) · Luigi Meneghello (1989) · Fleur Jaeggy (1990) · Livio Garzanti (1991) · Giorgio Bocca (1992) · Giovanni Giudici (1993) · Alberto Arbasino (1994) · Daniele Del Giudice (1995) · Raffaello Baldini (1996) · Sergio Ferrero (1997) · Giovanni Raboni (1998) · Fabio Carpi (1999) · Andrea Zanzotto - Mariano Bargellini (2000) · Serena Vitale (2001) · Roberto Calasso - Giorgio Orelli (2002) · Michele Mari - Edoardo Sanguineti - Eva Cantarella (2003) · Franco Cordero (2004) · Rosetta Loy (2005) · Filippo Tuena - Eugenio Borgna (2006) · Alessandro Spina (2007) · Andrej Longo (2008)

Viareggio Prize winning authors

Anselmo Bucci - Lorenzo Viani (1930) · Corrado Tumiati (1931) · Antonio Foschini (1932) · Achille Campanile (1933) · Raffaele Calzini (1934) · Mario Massa - Stefano Pirandello (1935) · Riccardo Bacchelli (1936) · Guelfo Civinini (1937) · Vittorio Giovanni Rossi - Enrico Pea (1938) · Arnaldo Frateili - Orio Vergani - Maria Bellonci (1939) · Silvio Micheli - Umberto Saba (1946) · Antonio Gramsci (1947) · Aldo Palazzeschi - Elsa Morante - Sibilla Aleramo (1948) · Arturo Carlo Jemolo - Renata Viganò (1949) - Francesco Jovine - Carlo Bernari (1950) · Domenico Rea (1951) · Tommaso Fiore (1952) · Carlo Emilio Gadda (1953) · Rocco Scotellaro (1954) · Vasco Pratolini (1955) · Carlo Levi - Gianna Manzini (1956) · Italo Calvino - Pier Paolo Pasolini (1957) · Ernesto De Martino (1958) · Marino Moretti (1959) · Giovanni Battista Angioletti (1960) · Alberto Moravia (1961) · Giorgio Bassani (1962) · Antonio Delfini - Sergio Solmi (1963) · Giuseppe Berto (1964) · Goffredo Parise (1965) · Ottiero Ottieri - Alfonso Gatto (1966) · Raffaello Brignetti (1967) · Libero Bigiaretti (1968) · Fulvio Tomizza (1969) · Nello Saito (1970) · Ugo Attardi (1971) · Romano Bilenchi (1972) · Achille Campanile (1973) · Clotilde Marghieri (1974) · Paolo Volponi (1975) · Mario Tobino - Dario Bellezza - Sergio Solmi (1976) · Davide Lajolo (1977) · Antonio Altomonte - Mario Luzi (1978) · Giorgio Manganelli (1979) · Stefano Terra (1980) · Enzo Siciliano (1981) · Primo Levi (1982) · Giuliana Morandini (1983) · Gina Lagorio (1984) · Manlio Cancogni (1985) · Marisa Volpi (1986) · Mario Spinella (1987) · Rosetta Loy (1988) · Salvatore Mannuzzu (1989) · Luisa Adorno - Cesare Viviani - Maurizio Calvesi (1990) · Antonio Debenedetti (1991) · Luigi Malerba (1992) · Alessandro Baricco (1993) · Antonio Tabucchi (1994) · Maurizio Maggiani (1995) · Ermanno Rea - Alda Merini (1996) · Claudio Piersanti - Franca Grisone - Corrado Stajano (1997) · Giorgio Pressburger - Michele Sovente - Carlo Ginzburg (1998) · Ernesto Franco (1999) · Giorgio van Straten - Sandro Veronesi (2000) · Niccolò Ammaniti - Michele Ranchetti - Giorgio Pestelli (2001) · Jaeggy Fleur - Jolanda Insana - Alfonso Berardinelli (2002) · Giuseppe Montesano (2003) · Edoardo Albinati - Andrea Tagliapietra - Livia Livi (2004) · Raffaele La Capria - Alberto Arbasino - Milo de Angelis (2005) · Gianni Celati - Giovanni Agosti - Giuseppe Conte - Roberto Saviano (2006) · Filippo Tuena - Paolo Mauri - Silvia Bre - Simona Baldanzi - Paolo Colagrande - Paolo Fallai (2007) · Francesca Sanvitale - Miguel Gotor - Eugenio De Signoribus (2008)

Austrian State Prize for European Literature winning authors

Zbigniew Herbert (1965) · W. H. Auden (1966) · Vasko Popa (1967) · Václav Havel (1968) · nobody (1969) · Eugène Ionesco (1970) · Sławomir Mrożek (1971) · Peter Huchel (1972) · Harold Pinter (1973) · Sándor Weöres (1974) · Pavel Kohout (1975) · Italo Calvino (1976) · Fulvio Tomizza (1977) · Simone de Beauvoir (1978) · nobody (1979) · Sarah Kirsch (1980) · Doris Lessing (1981) · Tadeusz Różewicz (1982) · Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1983) · Christa Wolf (1984) · nobody (1985) · Stanisław Lem (1986) · Milan Kundera (1987) · Andrzej Szczypiorski (1988) · Marguerite Duras (1989) · Helmut Heißenbüttel (1990) · Péter Nádas (1991) · Salman Rushdie (1992) · Chinghiz Aitmatov (1993) · Inger Christensen (1994) · Ilse Aichinger (1995) · Aleksandar Tišma (1996) · Jürg Laederach (1997) · Antonio Tabucchi (1998) · Dubravka Ugrešić (1999) · António Lobo Antunes (2000) · Umberto Eco (2001) · Christoph Hein (2002) · Cees Nooteboom (2003) · Julian Barnes (2004) · Claudio Magris (2005) · Jorge Semprún (2006) · A. L. Kennedy (2007) · Agota Kristof (2008)

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Donate to Wikimedia

		Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more
		Fairy Tale Companion. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Copyright © 2000, 2002, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more
		Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more
		Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved. Read more
		Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Italo Calvino". Read more

Italo Calvino

Contents