Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino (Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, 1923 – Siena, 1985) was one of the most influential Italian fiction writers of the twentieth century. He wrote novels and short stories in Italian, and his work, shaped by fable, science and play with form, was translated into many languages. His ability to combine imagination with a reflective look at the contemporary world keeps him a point of reference for readers far beyond Italy.

He was born in Cuba to an Italian family. His father, Mario Calvino, was a tropical agronomist and botanist, and his mother, Eva Mameli, was a botanist and university teacher. The family returned to Italy when Calvino was a small child and settled in Sanremo on the Ligurian coast. He grew up in a secular, anti-Fascist household with a scientific outlook that later left its mark on his writing. During the Second World War he refused military service in the Italian Social Republic and joined the Garibaldi Brigades, a partisan formation with communist leanings. After the war he settled in Turin, studied literature and joined the Italian Communist Party. There he met Cesare Pavese and came into contact with the publisher Einaudi, which played a decisive role in his literary formation.

His first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, appeared in 1947 within the neorealist current, though its fabular tone set it apart from straightforward realist chronicle. In the 1950s he turned to the trilogy Our Ancestors, in which fantasy gives allegorical shape to modern man. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 he left the party and his writing grew more interested in logic, combinatorics and reason. In the sixties and seventies he engaged with the Oulipo group in Paris and wrote Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities, works whose structure is built from combinations of elements. His later book Mr. Palomar reduced anecdote in favour of reflection and description.

Calvino died in 1985 while preparing lectures for Harvard University, published posthumously as Six Memos for the Next Millennium. His legacy lies in the union of formal rigour and intellectual curiosity, and in a view of literature as a space for thinking about the world through fable and play.