Calvino
Italo Calvino (1923-1985) - pronounced EE-ta-lo kal-VEE-no, IPA: /'iː talo kal 'viː no/ - was an Italian writer and intellectual. He also worked as a journalist and as an editor for the Italian publishing firm Einaudi.
Calvino was born in Cuba of Italian parents - his father, an agronomist, had researched on the island since 1917. In 1925 the family returned to Italy, and Calvino's childhood and teenage years were spent at San Remo on the coast of Liguria in northwest Italy. His parents were austere, high-minded agnostics with left-wing political sympathies, and Calvino was initially educated in private schools run by Protestants. In 1941 he entered the University of Turin to study agriculture and in 1943 moved to continue his studies at the University of Florence. When later that year the Allies invaded Italy and the Germans established the Republic of Salò, with Mussolini as its nominal head, in Northern Italy, Calvino joined the Italian resistance and fought as a member of a Communist resistance group until Liberation in 1945.
After the war Calvino completed his education in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Turin. On graduating in 1947 he joined Einaudi in Turin, but soon left to work as a journalist for L'Unità , the Communist daily newspaper. (He was then a member of the Italian Communist Party (CPI) and remained so until 1957 when he left in protest at the Russian invasion of Hungary the previous year). In 1950, however, he returned to Einaudi and worked for them for many years.
In 1967 he moved to Paris, where he came into contact with a number of French 'experimental' writers. (In 1968, though he did not share the basic ideology of the 'revolutionaries', he was attracted by some aspects of the 'cultural revolution' of that year.) In the 1970s and 1980s, by which time he had re-established his home in Italy, he undertook many lecture tours - in the United States, Mexico, Japan, and various European countries - as well as being a regular contributor to the leading Italian dailies Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica.
Calvino's first short story was published in 1945, and over the next four decades he produced a large number of novels and collections of short stories in a variety of styles. Some of the early novels - such as Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Spiders' Nests, 1947), an account of life in a resistance group as seen from the point of view of a ten-year old boy - are 'neo-realist' novels. Other works, such as Marcovaldo ovvero le stagioni in città (Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City, 1963), a set of twenty short stories which tell of the disappointments and misfortunes of Marcovaldo, a poor factory worker, incompetent but endearing, who has come from the countryside with his family and now earns a meagre wage as an unskilled labourer in a factory in one of the cities of northern Italy, have a strong element of fable or fantasy - in the mid-fifties Calvino worked on Fiabe italiane (Italian Folktales, 1956), collecting folk stories in the Italian dialects and translating them into standard Italian. He wrote other books for younger readers, such as Il visconte dimezzato (1952, translated as The Cloven Viscount, 1962), Il barone rampante (1957) (The Baron in the Trees, 1959) and Il cavaliere inesistente, 1959 (The Nonexistent Knight, 1962). Some of his later work is more 'experimental' - for example, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, 1979) is usually regarded as a 'post-modernist' novel.
