ltalo Calvino
Italo Calvino, (b. Oct. 15,
1923, Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba—d. Sept. 19, 1985, Siena,
Italy), Italian journalist, short-story writer, and
novelist, whose whimsical and imaginative fables made him
one of the most important Italian fiction writers in the
20th century.
Calvino left Cuba for Italy
in his youth. He joined the Italian Resistance during World
War II and after the war settled in Turin, obtaining his
degree in literature while working for the Communist
periodical L’Unità and for the publishing house of Einaudi.
From 1959 to 1966 he edited, with Elio Vittorini, the
left-wing magazine Il Menabò di letteratura.
Two of Calvino’s first
fictional works were inspired by his participation in the
Italian Resistance: the Neorealistic novel Il sentiero dei
nidi di ragno (1947; The Path to the Nest of Spiders), which
views the Resistance through the experiences of an
adolescent as helpless in the midst of events as the adults
around him; and the collection of stories entitled Ultimo
viene il corvo (1949; Adam, One Afternoon, and Other
Stories).
Calvino turned decisively
to fantasy and allegory in the 1950s, producing the three
fantastic tales that brought him international acclaim. The
first of these fantasies, Il visconte dimezzato (1952; “The
Cloven Viscount,” in The Nonexistent Knight & the Cloven
Viscount), is an allegorical story of a man split in two—a
good half and an evil half—by a cannon shot; he becomes
whole through his love for a peasant girl. The second and
most highly praised fantasy, Il barone rampante (1957; The
Baron in the Trees), is a whimsical tale of a 19th-century
nobleman who one day decides to climb into the trees and who
never sets foot on the ground again. From the trees he does,
however, participate fully in the affairs of his fellow men
below. The tale wittily explores the interaction and tension
between reality and imagination. The third fantasy, Il
cavaliere inesistente (1959; “The Nonexistent Knight,” in
The Nonexistent Knight & the Cloven Viscount), is a mock
epic chivalric tale.
Among Calvino’s later works
of fantasy is Le cosmicomiche (1965; Cosmicomics), a
stream-of-consciousness narrative that treats the creation
and evolution of the universe. In the later novels Le città
invisibili (1972; Invisible Cities), Il castello dei destini
incrociate (1973; The Castle of Crossed Destinies), and Se
una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979; If on a Winter’s
Night a Traveler), Calvino uses playfully innovative
structures and shifting viewpoints in order to examine the
nature of chance, coincidence, and change. Una pietra sopra:
Discorsi di letteratura e società (1980; The Uses of
Literature) is a collection of essays he wrote for Il
Menabò.
