Italo Calvino Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Birth and Family
Italo Calvino was born on 15 October 1923 in Santiago de las Vegas, near Havana, Cuba, to Italian parents working in the natural sciences. His father, Mario Calvino, was an agronomist who directed agricultural experiments; his mother, Eva Mameli, was a botanist. Soon after his birth the family returned to Italy and settled in San Remo on the Ligurian coast. The household was steeped in scientific curiosity, political awareness, and an international outlook. Books, plants, and discussions about the natural world shaped Calvino's early imagination and gave him a lifelong respect for clarity and observation.

Formation and Resistance
Calvino attended school in San Remo and briefly enrolled at the University of Turin before the Second World War disrupted normal life. The fall of Fascism and the German occupation drew him into the Italian Resistance. In 1944 he joined formations of the Garibaldi Brigades in the Ligurian hills. The experience forged his political consciousness and provided a ground-level view of fear, solidarity, and moral ambiguity that would inform his first fiction. After the war he gravitated away from formal scientific study toward literature, journalism, and publishing, finding in writing a way to reconcile civic engagement with artistic inquiry.

Turin, Einaudi, and Literary Circles
In the immediate postwar years Calvino moved to Turin and began working with the Einaudi publishing house, a center of Italy's cultural reconstruction. There he encountered a community that included Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, Natalia Ginzburg, and Giulio Einaudi. Pavese encouraged the young writer's debut novel, and Vittorini opened doors in literary journalism. Calvino contributed articles and reportage to newspapers and journals, including L Unita and Il Politecnico, honing a lucid, economical prose. He joined the Italian Communist Party in the late 1940s, in line with many anti-Fascist intellectuals of his generation, while keeping a distinctive independence of tone in his work. His first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Spider's Nests, 1947), was a neorealist account of partisan life seen through the eyes of a child, praised by Pavese and Vittorini for its freshness.

From Neorealism to Fable
Calvino soon distanced himself from strict neorealism, seeking forms that could hold allegory, irony, and philosophical play. The story collection Ultimo viene il corvo (1949) showed his interest in precision and wonder. In the 1950s he wrote the trilogy I nostri antenati: Il visconte dimezzato (1952), Il barone rampante (1957), and Il cavaliere inesistente (1959). These tales, about a divided nobleman, a boy who lives in trees, and a suit of armor without a body, transformed moral and political questions into witty parables. During these years he continued editorial work at Einaudi alongside Natalia Ginzburg and others, reading manuscripts, shaping series, and guiding younger authors. The Soviet repression of 1956 led him to leave the Communist Party in 1957, a break that confirmed his belief in literature as a field of ethical inquiry separate from party orthodoxy.

Public Voice and Journalism
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s Calvino maintained a steady presence as a journalist and essayist. He wrote cultural columns, book reviews, and occasional pieces that brought his exacting style to readers beyond the novel. Journalism for him was a laboratory of form: the short piece demanded quickness, the report demanded exactitude. He also edited anthologies and introduced foreign writers to Italian audiences, extending the cosmopolitan mission that had animated Einaudi since its founding under Giulio Einaudi and its editors, among them Pavese and Vittorini.

Experiments of the 1960s
Turning away from fable toward science-inflected invention, Calvino published Marcovaldo (1963), episodic urban tales about a worker navigating the modern city. With Le cosmicomiche (1965) and Ti con zero (1967), he reimagined scientific hypotheses as myths in which a protean narrator, Qfwfq, tells stories of the universe with humor and metaphysical grace. These books married playful speculation to rigorous structure, reflecting Calvino's fascination with how narratives could model knowledge.

Marriage, Paris, and Oulipo
In 1964 Calvino married Esther Judith Chichita Singer, an Argentine-born translator and interpreter whose cosmopolitan background complemented his own. They would later have a daughter, Giovanna. After periods in Rome, Calvino moved to Paris in the late 1960s, where he engaged with structuralism and new literary experiments. He associated with Oulipo, a workshop of potential literature founded by Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais, and befriended writers such as Georges Perec. In this circle he explored combinatorial methods and constraints, seeking forms that could multiply narrative possibilities without sacrificing clarity. Conversations circulating in Paris, including those spurred by critics like Roland Barthes, sharpened his thinking about texts as systems and readers as co-creators.

Maturity: Cities, Castles, and Readers
The 1970s brought works that secured his international reputation. Il castello dei destini incrociati used the tarot as an engine for stories whose paths intersect and refract. Le citta invisibili (1972) staged a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, a meditation on language, memory, and urban imagination. Se una notte d inverno un viaggiatore (1979) offered a novel about the act of reading itself, presenting opening chapters of many books alongside the adventures of a Reader and a Other Reader, a tour de force of unfinished beginnings that invited the audience into the machinery of narration. These books distilled lessons from Oulipo and from his editorial years at Einaudi, reuniting formal ingenuity with human curiosity.

Late Work and Lectures
In the early 1980s Calvino published Palomar (1983), a series of finely observed pieces in which a reflective man tries to make sense of waves, birds, shop windows, and the cosmos, turning attention into a philosophic practice. He was invited to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1985-1986. He prepared texts later published as Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Lezioni americane), dedicated to values he thought literature should carry forward: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. A sixth planned lecture, on a complementary value he had been elaborating, remained unfinished at his death.

Places of Work and Final Years
Calvino divided his time among editorial rooms in Turin, apartments in Rome and Paris, and a house in Roccamare, on the Tuscan coast near Castiglione della Pescaia, where he wrote in relative seclusion. The seaside landscape echoed the Ligurian horizons of his childhood and offered a quiet counterpoint to the cosmopolitan exchanges he pursued with colleagues and friends. He remained in contact with fellow Einaudi veterans, including Natalia Ginzburg, and kept alive the lessons of mentors such as Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini, whose early support had set him on his path.

Death and Legacy
In September 1985 Calvino suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died in Siena on the 19th of that month. He was 61. He left behind his wife, Chichita, and their daughter, Giovanna, as well as a body of work that bridged postwar neorealism, allegorical fable, scientific fictions, and structuralist experiment. Editors, writers, and readers across Italy and abroad paid tribute to a figure who had combined the discipline of an editor with the curiosity of a journalist and the inventiveness of a storyteller. Calvino's example continues to guide authors who seek forms adequate to complexity while retaining economy, lucidity, and a sense of wonder. Through the communities he inhabited and helped shape, from Einaudi's editorial rooms to Oulipo's workshops, and through the companionship of figures such as Pavese, Vittorini, Ginzburg, Queneau, and Perec, he transformed the possibilities of narrative for his century and beyond.

Our collection contains 10 quotes who is written by Italo, under the main topics: Love - Writing - Deep - Book - Privacy & Cybersecurity.

Other people realated to Italo: Jorge Luis Borges (Poet), Umberto Eco (Novelist), Primo Levi (Scientist), Raymond Queneau (Poet), Harry Mathews (Author), William Weaver (Author)

• 1979 If on a winter's night a traveler (Novel)
• 1972 Invisible Cities (Novel)
• 1965 Cosmicomics (Short Stories)
• 1957 The Baron in the Trees (Novel)
• 1947 The Path to the Nest of Spiders (Novel)

• Wikipedia