ITALO CALVINO, 'TURIN IS A SERIOUS BUT SAD CITY'

Today, Joseph de Ca'th Lon and The Grandma have continued talking about writers who have a vital relationship with Turin and they have chosen Italo Calvino.

Italo Calvino (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. He is buried in the garden cemetery of Castiglione della Pescaia in Tuscany.

Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba, in 1923.

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.

Other legacies include the parents' beliefs in Freemasonry, republicanism with elements of anarchism and Marxism. His parents refused to give their sons any education in the Catholic Faith or any other religion.

In 1941, Calvino 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, Johan Huizinga, and Pisacane, and works by Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein on physics. Calvino's real aspiration was to be a playwright. His letters to Eugenio Scalfari overflow with references to Italian and foreign plays, and with plots and characters of future theatrical projects.

Disdainful of Turin students, Calvino saw himself as enclosed in a provincial shell that offered the illusion of immunity from the Fascist nightmare.

In spring 1944, her mother encouraged her sons to enter the Italian Resistance in the name of natural justice and family virtues. 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 settled in Turin in 1945, after a long hesitation over living there or in Milan. 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 comando (1945; Gone to Headquarters) in Il Politecnico, a Turin-based weekly magazine associated with the university.

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.

Ultimo viene il corvo (The Crow Comes Last), a collection of stories based on his wartime experiences, was published to acclaim in 1949.

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.

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.

For two years, Calvino collated tales found in 19th century collections across Italy then translated 200 of the finest from various dialects into Italian.

In 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist Party.

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.

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 Square de Châtillon.

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.

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 and he died during the night of 18/19 September.

More information: New York Public Library

It is not the voice that commands the story; 
it is the ear.

Italo Calvino