Italo Calvino Popular Books
Italo Calvino Biography & Facts
Italo Calvino (, also US: , Italian: [ˈiːtalo kalˈviːno]; 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian writer and journalist. 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. Biography Parents 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. Born 47 years earlier in Sanremo, 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". In 1917, Mario left for Cuba to conduct scientific experiments, after living through the Mexican Revolution. Calvino's mother, Giuliana Luigia Evelina "Eva" Mameli, was a botanist and university professor. A native of Sassari in Sardinia and 11 years younger than her husband, she married while 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". Eva gave Calvino his unusual first name to remind him of his Italian heritage, although since he would end up growing up in Italy after all, Calvino thought his name sounded "belligerently nationalist". Calvino described his parents as being "very different in personality from one another", suggesting perhaps deeper tensions behind a comfortable, albeit strict, middle-class upbringing devoid of conflict. As an adolescent, he found it hard to relate to poverty and the working-class, and was "ill at ease" with his parents' openness to the labourers who filed into his father's study on Saturdays to receive their weekly paycheck. Early life and education In 1925, less than two years after Calvino's birth, the family returned to Italy and settled permanently in Sanremo on the Ligurian coast. Calvino's brother Floriano, 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 Sanremo, Mario pioneered the cultivation of the 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 derive 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." He and Floriano would climb the tree-rich estate and perch for hours on the branches reading their favourite adventure stories. 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." 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: "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 up over it, asking for help." Other legacies include the parents' beliefs in Freemasonry, republicanism with elements of anarchism and Marxism. Austere freethinkers with an intense hatred of the ruling National Fascist Party, Eva and Mario also refused to give their sons any education in the Catholic Faith or any other religion. Italo attended the English nursery school St George's College, followed by a Protestant elementary private school run by Waldensians. His secondary schooling, with a classical lyceum curriculum, was completed at the state-run Liceo Gian Domenico Cassini where, at his parents' request, he was exempted from religion classes but frequently asked to justify his anti-conformism to teachers, janitors, and fellow pupils. In his mature years, Calvino described the experience as having 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". In 1938, Eugenio Scalfari, who went on to found the weekly magazine L'Espresso and La Repubblica, a major Italian newspaper, came from Civitavecchia to join the same class though a year younger, and they shared the same desk. 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", he and Scalfari founded a university movement called the MUL. Eva managed to delay her son's enrolment in the Party's armed scouts, the Balilla Moschettieri, and then arranged that he be excused, as a non-Catholic, from performing devotional acts in Church. But later on, as a compulsory member, he could not avoid the assemblies and parades of the Avanguardisti, and was forced to participate in the Italian invasion of the French Riviera in June 1940. World War II 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. Luigi Pirandello and Gabriele D'Annunzio, Cesare Vico Lodovici and Ugo Betti, Eugene O'Neill and Thornton Wilder are among the main authors Calvino cites as his sources of inspiration. Disdainful of Turin students, Calvino saw himself as enclosed in a "provincial shell" that offered .... Discover the Italo Calvino popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Italo Calvino books.
Best Seller Italo Calvino Books of 2024
-
First Love, Last Love
Katie FlynnA powerful story of two sisters, and the love that changed their livesIt wasn't a privileged childhood, but it was a happy one. Sybil and Lizzie Cream, brought up in a fisherman's ...
-
Conflitos entre homem e natureza na obra ficcional de Italo Calvino
Priscila Linhares VelloniHá muito tempo a crítica literária dedicada ao escritor Italo Calvino vem apontando para a centralidade da relação homem, cultura e natureza em sua produção ficcional. A questão fo...
-
Orlando furioso di Ludovico Ariosto raccontato da Italo Calvino
Italo CalvinoL'Orlando furioso è un libro unico nel suo genere e può esser letto senza far riferimento a nessun altro libro precedente o seguente; è un universo a sé in cui si può viaggiare in ...
-
White Nights
Fyodor Dostoyevsky & Ronald Meyer'My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man's life?'A poignant tale of love and loneliness from Russia's foremost writer.One of 46 new books i...
-
Italo Calvino. Un intellettuale eclettico.
Alessandro QuintiÈ in "punta di penna" che, con questo agile ebook, desidero pubblicare le note biografiche che seguono, note a margine del Centenario della nascita di uno dei più grandi scrittori ...
-
Italo Calvino und seine Lezioni Americane
Susanne DrewsDiese Hausarbeit soll sich mit dem literaturtheoretischem Werk „Lezioni Americane – Sei proposte per il prossimo millenio“ von Italo Calvino beschäftigen. Zuerst wird im allgemeine...
-
Italo Calvino e Sanremo
Laura GuglielmiItalo Calvino scrisse che per vedere una città “non basta tenere gli occhi aperti. Occorre per prima cosa scartare tutto ciò che impedisce di vederla”. Laura Guglielmi, sanremese, ...
-
The Written World and the Unwritten World
Italo Calvino“Wonderful… Calvino’s prose is sparkling as ever, and he approaches ideas with wit and an open mind, always ready to challenge a stale point of view. This anthology will delight Ca...
-
Italo Calvino, una ardilla en Einaudi
Carlos Clavería LaguardaEl infatigable Italo Calvino habría cumplido cien años el 15 de octubre de 2023 si el esfuerzo excesivo que conlleva ser, entre otras cosas, «diligente redactor editorial» no hubie...
-
Italo Calvino. El escritor que quiso ser invisible
Antonio Serrano CuetoItalo Calvino (19231985) solía decir que de un escritor sólo cuentan sus obras, pues lo biográfico carece de interés. Sin embargo, su producción literaria se encabalga en su vida h...
-
London Labour and the London Poor
Victor Neuburg & Henry MayhewLondon Labour and the London Poor originated in a series of newspaper articles written by the great journalist Henry Mayhew between 1849 and 1850. A dozen years later, it had grown...
-
Passing
Nella LarsenClare Kendry has severed all ties to her past. Elegant, fairskinned and ambitious, she is married to a white man who is unaware of her AfricanAmerican heritage. When she renews her...
-
The Uses Of Literature
Italo CalvinoIn these widely praised essays, Calvino reflects on literature as process, the great narrative game in the course of which writer and reader are challenged to understand the world....
-
Italo Calvino e i classici latini
Ginevra LatiniNelle pagine cosmologiche di Lucrezio, Ovidio e Plinio il Vecchio, Calvino rintraccia i valori archetipici delle Lezioni americane come la scrittura «evidente», la logica di «conti...
-
Happiness, as Such
Natalia Ginzburg & Minna ProctorThe hauntingly beautiful epistolary novel from “a glowing light of modern Italian literature” (New York Times Book Review) Longlisted for the PEN Translation AwardAt the heart of H...
-
The House on the Hill
Cesare Pavese & Tim Parks'Pavese's novels are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings' Italo CalvinoJune, 1943. Allied aircraft are bombing Turin; fascist Ita...
-
The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories
Jhumpa Lahiri'Rich. . . eclectic. . . a feast' TelegraphThis landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradi...
-
Cash and Curry
Chris Newens2017 WINNER OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZEIn this quest across India during the recent cash crisis, Chris Newens follows in the footsteps of TV chef Rick Stein in...
-
Italo Calvino
Antonio Serrano CuetoItalo Calvino (19231985) sosteneva che la biografia di uno scrittore è priva di interesse, contano solo le sue opere. E in effetti ebbe sempre un rapporto complesso nevrotico, lo ...
-
Ornament and Crime
Adolf LoosRevolutionary essays on design, aesthetics and materialism from one of the great masters of modern architectureAdolf Loos, the great Viennese pioneer of modern architecture, was ...
-
The Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio & G. H. McWilliamIn the summer of 1348, as the Black Death ravages their city, ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside...Taken from the Greek, meaning 'tenday event', Boccaccio's Decam...
-
Italo Calvino e il fantastico
Chiara LentiniIl presente testo vuole essere uno studio attento degli scritti di Italo Calvino, specie quelli incentrati sui temi di: surreale, fantastico, favolistico e fiabesco. Un'analisi att...
-
La novela infinita de Italo Calvino
Dulce María ZúñigaItalo Calvino (19231985) fue un maestro en desafiar lasa convenciones literarias y en reinventar el acto de narrar. En sus creaciones, la realidad y la ficción danzan en un equilib...
-
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Rainer Maria RilkeWhile his old furniture rots in storage, Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris, with little but a library reader's card to distinguish him from the city's untouchable...
-
Orlando Furioso di Ludovico Ariosto raccontato da Italo Calvino
Italo CalvinoCalvino si muove leggero nella trama dei destini incrociati di Angelica, Bradamante, Astolfo e Orlando, colui "che per amor venne in furore e matto", regalandoci così un'opera nuov...
-
The Proper Study Of Mankind
Isaiah Berlin‘He becomes everyman’s guide to everything exciting in the history of ideas’ New York Review of BooksIsaiah Berlin was one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century, and one...
-
Italo Calvino
Anna MarioI climatologi avvertono che «abbiamo poco tempo», ma intanto: le risorse energetiche si esauriscono, popolazioni intere fuggono in cerca di cibo e sicurezza, mentre un sistema capi...
-
The Moon and the Bonfires
Cesare Pavese & Tim Parks'Insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive' The New York Times Book ReviewA new translation by Tim ParksTwenty years after making his fortune in America, Eel is drawn back to t...
-
The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma
Lima Barreto'The seed of madness exists in all of us and with no warning may attack, overpower, crush and bury us ... ' Policarpo Quaresma fastidious civil servant, dedicated patriot, selfsty...
-
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Italo Calvino
Franco Ricci, Andrea Dini, Eugenio Bolongaro, JoAnn Cannon & Guy P. RaffaGiven the range of his writing, teaching Calvino can seem a daunting task. This volume aims to help instructors develop creative and engaging classroom strategies. Part 1, "Materia...
-
Three Japanese Buddhist Monks
Saigyo, Kamo no Chomei, Yoshida Kenko & Meredith McKinney'I have relinquished all that ties me to the world, but the one thing that still haunts me is the beauty of the sky'These simple, inspiring writings by three medieval Buddhist monk...
-
Elective Affinities
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe & R. J. HollingdaleEduard and Charlotte are an aristocratic couple who live a harmonious but idle life in their estate. But the peace of their existence is thrown into chaos when two visitors Eduard...
-
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino & Martin McLaughlinThe first collection of letters in English by one of the great writers of the twentieth centuryThis is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the gr...
-
Geografie della memoria. Italo Calvino
Lucind SperaNei luoghi del proprio passato, veri depositi memoriali, Calvino sembra rintracciare lo stimolo visivo teso al recupero dell’essenza profonda del suo essere ed essere stato. Questo...
-
Orlando Furioso
Ludovico Ariosto & Barbara ReynoldsOne of the greatest epic poems of the Italian Renaissance, Orlando Furioso is an intricate tale of love and enchantment set at the time of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne's conf...