Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was born on October 15, 1923, in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, where his Italian father was a tropical agronomist working on a government research project. The family returned to Italy when he was two, settling in San Remo on the Ligurian coast, where his father ran a botanical garden and his mother, a botanist and botanizing pharmacologist, conducted scientific research. Calvino later joked that he was the only writer who had been raised by two botanists, and his fiction bears the mark of a scientific formation: a love of classification, taxonomy, and formal systems, combined with an awareness of the irreducible strangeness of the natural world. He studied literature at the University of Turin, joined the Communist Party during World War II, and fought with the Italian Resistance against the Nazi occupation — experiences he drew on in his early partisan fiction.

Calvino’s early career was associated with Italian neorealism and with the political culture of postwar Italian communism. His first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), narrated the Resistance from the perspective of a child, and his early story collection Adam, One Afternoon (1949) continued in a broadly realist vein. But Calvino’s imagination was too restless and too playful to remain within realist constraints, and he rapidly moved toward the fantastic, the allegorical, and the formally experimental. His trilogy Our Ancestors — comprising The Cloven Viscount (1952), The Baron in the Trees (1957), and The Nonexistent Knight (1959) — used fairy-tale and chivalric romance frameworks to explore philosophical questions about identity, freedom, and the divided self.

Invisible Cities (1972), Calvino’s most celebrated work, consists of a series of verbal portraits of imaginary cities, ostensibly described by Marco Polo to the aging Kublai Khan. Each city bears a woman’s name, each is structured around a different concept or quality — cities of memory, of desire, of signs, of death, of the continuous, of the hidden — and together they constitute a meditation on the nature of cities, of language, of desire, and of narrative itself. The book is simultaneously a philosophical treatise, a prose poem, a work of architecture, and a novel — or rather, it demonstrates that none of these categories adequately contains it. It is one of the most formally original and intellectually stimulating works of twentieth-century fiction.

Calvino’s subsequent works — The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), and Mr. Palomar (1983) — continued his formal experimentation. If on a winter’s night a traveler, a second-person novel about the experience of reading that incorporates ten different opening chapters of different fictional styles, is among the most celebrated metafictional novels in the world literary canon. He was associated with the French OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) group, whose members — including Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec — explored the possibilities of formal constraint as a generator of literary creativity.

Calvino died on September 19, 1985, in Siena, Italy, from a cerebral hemorrhage, two weeks before he was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, which he had been working on and which were published posthumously as Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988). He is widely regarded as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century: a master of the short form, a theorist of narrative, and a playful, endlessly inventive intelligence whose work has influenced writers, architects, philosophers, and designers worldwide.