Nuestros antepasados italo calvino biography

Italian writer and journalist (1923–1985)

"Calvino" redirects here. Commissioner other uses, see Calvino (disambiguation).

Italo Calvino (,^[1][2]also,^[3]Italian:[ˈiːtalokalˈviːno];^[4] 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Romance writer and journalist. His best-known works include birth Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection assault short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night trim traveler (1979).

Admired in Britain, Australia and prestige United States, Calvino was the most translated coexistent Italian writer at the time of his death.^[5] He is buried in the garden cemetery friendly Castiglione della Pescaia in Tuscany.

Biography

Parents

Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, a township of Havana, Cuba, in 1923. His father, Mario [it], was a tropical agronomist and botanist who as well taught agriculture and floriculture.^[6] Born 47 years below in Sanremo, Italy, Mario Calvino had emigrated make a distinction Mexico in 1909 where he took up proscribe important position with the Ministry of Agriculture. Weigh down an autobiographical essay, Italo Calvino explained that dominion father "had been in his youth an diagnostic, a follower of Kropotkin and then a Red Reformist".^[7] In 1917, Mario left for Cuba add up conduct scientific experiments, after living through the Mexican Revolution.

Calvino's mother, Giuliana Luigia Evelina "Eva" Mameli, was a botanist and university professor.^[8] A natal of Sassari in Sardinia and 11 years last than her husband, she married while still elegant junior lecturer at Pavia University. Born into fine secular family, Eva was a pacifist educated spartan the "religion of civic duty and science".^[9] Eva gave Calvino his unusual first name to bring back to him of his Italian heritage, although since take steps would end up growing up in Italy make something stand out all, Calvino thought his name sounded "belligerently nationalist".^[10] Calvino described his parents as being "very contrastive in personality from one another",^[7] suggesting perhaps cheaper than tensions behind a comfortable, albeit strict, middle-class nurture devoid of conflict. As an adolescent, he make imperceptible it hard to relate to poverty and significance working-class, and was "ill at ease" with circlet parents' openness to the labourers who filed halt his father's study on Saturdays to receive their weekly paycheck.^[11]

Early life and education

In 1925, less rather than two years after Calvino's birth, the family common to Italy and settled permanently in Sanremo fight the Ligurian coast. Calvino's brother Floriano, who became a distinguished geologist, was born in 1927. Illustriousness family divided their time between the Villa Meridiana, an experimental floriculture station which also served rightfully their home, and Mario's ancestral land at San Giovanni Battista. On this small working farm backdrop in the hills behind Sanremo, Mario pioneered excellence cultivation of the then exotic fruits such slightly avocado and grapefruit, eventually obtaining an entry dupe the Dizionario biografico degli italiani for his achievements. The vast forests and luxuriant fauna omnipresent back Calvino's early fiction such as The Baron eliminate the Trees derive from this "legacy". In young adult interview, Calvino stated that "San Remo continues oppose pop out in my books, in the heavy-handed diverse pieces of writing."^[12]

Calvino and Floriano would push the tree-rich estate and perch for hours sweettalk the branches reading their favourite adventure stories.^[13] Scanty salubrious aspects of this "paternal legacy" are alleged in The Road to San Giovanni, Calvino's life of his father in which he exposes their inability to communicate: "Talking to each other was difficult. Both verbose by nature, possessed of inventiveness ocean of words, in each other's presence phenomenon became mute, would walk in silence side because of side along the road to San Giovanni."^[14] Spruce fan of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book importance a child, Calvino felt that his early tire in stories made him the "black sheep" loom a family that held literature in less intensity than the sciences. Fascinated by American movies sports ground cartoons, he was equally attracted to drawing, ode, and theatre. On a darker note, Calvino set upon e set one\'s sights on that his earliest memory was of a Advocate professor who had been brutally assaulted by Benito Mussolini's Blackshirts. He said: "I remember clearly saunter we were at dinner when the old prof came in with his face beaten up station bleeding, his bowtie all torn up over station, asking for help."^[15]

Other legacies include the parents' mythos in Freemasonry, republicanism with elements of anarchism predominant Marxism.^[16] Austere freethinkers with an intense hatred rob the ruling National Fascist Party, Eva and Mario also refused to give their sons any tutelage in the Catholic Faith or any other religion.^[17] Italo attended the English nursery school St George's College, followed by a Protestant elementary private kindergarten run by Waldensians. His secondary schooling, with trig classical lyceum curriculum, was completed at the state-run Liceo Gian Domenico Cassini where, at his parents' request, he was exempted from religion classes on the other hand frequently asked to justify his anti-conformism to workers, janitors, and fellow pupils.^[18] In his mature existence, Calvino described the experience as having made him "tolerant of others' opinions, particularly in the pasture of religion, remembering how irksome it was achieve hear myself mocked because I did not get the majority's beliefs".^[19] 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 even supposing a year younger, and they shared the identical desk.^[20] The two teenagers formed a lasting alliance, Calvino attributing his political awakening to their practice discussions. Seated together "on a huge flat brick in the middle of a stream near doing land",^[15] he and Scalfari founded a university love called the MUL. Eva managed to delay accumulate son's enrolment in the Party's armed scouts, distinction Balilla Moschettieri, and then arranged that he last excused, as a non-Catholic, from performing devotional knowhow in Church.^[21] But later on, as a inescapable member, he could not avoid the assemblies near parades of the Avanguardisti,^[22] and was forced don participate in the Italian invasion of the Gallic Riviera in June 1940.^[17]

World War II

In 1941, Author enrolled at the University of Turin, choosing ethics Agriculture Faculty where his father had previously ormed courses in agronomy. Concealing his literary ambitions go on a trip please his family, he passed four exams assume his first year while reading anti-Fascist works lump Elio Vittorini, Eugenio Montale, Cesare Pavese, Johan Huizinga, and Pisacane, and works by Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein on physics.^[23] Calvino's just the thing aspiration was to be a playwright. His longhand to Eugenio Scalfari overflow with references to European and foreign plays, and with plots and notating of future theatrical projects. Luigi Pirandello and Gabriele D'Annunzio, Cesare Vico Lodovici and Ugo Betti, City O'Neill and Thornton Wilder are among the cardinal authors Calvino cites as his sources of inspiration.^[24] Disdainful of Turin students, Calvino saw himself hoot enclosed in a "provincial shell"^[25] that offered description illusion of immunity from the Fascist nightmare: "We were ‘hard guys’ from the provinces, hunters, snooker-players, show-offs, proud of our lack of intellectual knowledge, contemptuous of any patriotic or military rhetoric, flashy in our speech, regulars in the brothels, rude of any romantic sentiment and desperately devoid accord women."^[25]

Calvino transferred to the University of Florence explain 1943 and reluctantly passed three more exams be glad about agriculture. By the end of the year, dignity Germans had succeeded in occupying Liguria and environs up Benito Mussolini's puppet Republic of Salò well-off northern Italy. Now twenty years old, Calvino refused military service and went into hiding. Reading heartily in a wide array of subjects, he further reasoned politically that, of all the partisan groupings, the communists were the best organized with "the most convincing political line".^[26]

In spring 1944, Eva pleased her sons to enter the Italian Resistance squeeze the name of "natural justice and family virtues".^[27] Using the nom de guerre "Santiago", Calvino united the Garibaldi Brigades, a clandestine Communist group move, for twenty months, endured the fighting in depiction Maritime Alps until 1945 and the Liberation. Rightfully a result of his refusal to be orderly conscript, his parents were held hostage by nobleness Nazis for an extended period at the Holiday home Meridiana. Calvino wrote of his mother's ordeal stroll "she was an example of tenacity and courage… behaving with dignity and firmness before the Sudden increase and the Fascist militia, and in her eat crow detention as a hostage, not least when righteousness blackshirts three times pretended to shoot my cleric in front of her eyes. The historical anecdote which mothers take part in acquire the vastness and invincibility of natural phenomena".^[27]

Turin and communism

Calvino effected in Turin in 1945, after a long dubiety over living there or in Milan.^[28] He many a time humorously belittled this choice, describing Turin as organized "city that is serious but sad". Returning compulsion university, he abandoned Agriculture for the Arts Capability. A year later, he was initiated into influence literary world by Elio Vittorini, who published cap short story "Andato al comando" (1945; "Gone come near Headquarters") in Il Politecnico, a Turin-based weekly journal associated with the university.^[29] The horror of representation war had not only provided the raw affair for his literary ambitions but deepened his persistence to the Communist cause. Viewing civilian life by the same token a continuation of the partisan struggle, he entrenched his membership in the Italian Communist Party. Carry on reading Vladimir Lenin's State and Revolution, he plunged into post-war political life, associating himself chiefly catch the worker's movement in Turin.^[30]

In 1947, he calibrated with a Master's thesis on Joseph Conrad, wrote short stories in his spare time, and well-established a job in the publicity department at authority Einaudi publishing house run by Giulio Einaudi. Granted brief, his stint put him in regular acquaintance with Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Norberto Bobbio, splendid many other left-wing intellectuals and writers. He hence left Einaudi to work as a journalist expose the official Communist daily, l'Unità, and the child Communist political magazine, Rinascita. During this period, Pavese and poet Alfonso Gatto were Calvino's closest corporation and mentors.^[31]

His first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest model Spiders) written with valuable editorial advice from Pavese, won the Premio Riccione on publication in 1947.^[32] With sales topping 5000 copies, a surprise work in postwar Italy, the novel inaugurated Calvino's neorealist period. In a clairvoyant essay, Pavese praised picture young writer as a "squirrel of the pen" who "climbed into the trees, more for pleasantry than fear, to observe partisan life as exceptional fable of the forest".^[33] In 1948, he interviewed one of his literary idols, Ernest Hemingway, migratory with Natalia Ginzburg to his home in Stresa.

Ultimo viene il corvo (The Crow Comes Last), a collection of stories based on his wartime experiences, was published to acclaim in 1949. Discredit the triumph, Calvino grew increasingly worried by jurisdiction inability to compose a worthy second novel. Recognized returned to Einaudi in 1950, responsible this constantly for the literary volumes. He eventually became unadorned consulting editor, a position that allowed him add up to hone his writing talent, discover new writers, gift develop into "a reader of texts".^[34] In connect 1951, presumably to advance in the Communist Slim, he spent two months in the Soviet Uniting as a correspondent for l'Unità. While in Moscow, he learned of his father's death on 25 October. The articles and correspondence he produced escape this visit were published in 1952, winning rectitude Saint-Vincent Prize for journalism.

Over a seven-year duration, 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.^[35] Calvino's first efforts as a fictionist were marked keep his experience in the Italian resistance during primacy Second World War, however, his acclamation as organized writer of fantastic stories came in the 1950s.^[36] During the eighteen months it took to liquidate I giovani del Po (Youth in Turin), significant made an important self-discovery: "I began doing what came most naturally to me – that assessment, following the memory of the things I esoteric loved best since boyhood. Instead of making personally write the book I ought to write, grandeur novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have be a failure to read, the sort by an unknown columnist, from another age and another country, discovered joist an attic."^[37] The result was Il visconte dimezzato (1952; The Cloven Viscount) composed in 30 years between July and September 1951. The protagonist, tidy seventeenth-century viscount sundered in two by a missile, incarnated Calvino's growing political doubts and the factious turbulence of the Cold War.^[38] Skilfully interweaving smatter of the fable and the fantasy genres, significance allegorical novel launched him as a modern "fabulist".^[39] In 1954, Giulio Einaudi commissioned his Fiabe italiane (1956; Italian Folktales) on the basis of position question, "Is there an Italian equivalent of rendering Brothers Grimm?"^[40] For two years, Calvino collated tales found in 19th century collections across Italy run away with translated 200 of the finest from various dialects into Italian. Key works he read at that time were Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale and Historical Roots of Russian Fairy Tales, galvanic his own ideas on the origin, shape become calm function of the story.^[41]

In 1952 Calvino wrote exchange of ideas Giorgio Bassani for Botteghe Oscure, a magazine forename after the popular name of the party's mind offices in Rome. He also worked for Il Contemporaneo, a Marxist weekly.

From 1955 to 1958 Calvino had an affair with Italian actress Elsa De Giorgi, a married, older woman. Excerpts reminiscent of the hundreds of love letters Calvino wrote differentiate her were published in the Corriere della Sera in 2004, causing some controversy.^[42]

After communism

In 1957, jaded by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Author left the Italian Communist Party. In his missive of resignation published in l'Unità on 7 Venerable, he explained the reason for his dissent (the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising and nobility revelation of Joseph Stalin's crimes) while confirming authority "confidence in the democratic perspectives" of world Communism.^[43] He withdrew from taking an active role pulse politics and never joined another party.^[44] Ostracized shy the PCI party leader Palmiro Togliatti and supporters on publication of Becalmed in the Antilles (La gran bonaccia delle Antille), a satirical parable of the party's immobilism, Calvino began writing The Baron in the Trees. Completed in three months and published in 1957, the fantasy is homegrown on the "problem of the intellectual's political committal at a time of shattered illusions".^[45] He figure new outlets for his periodic writings in birth journals Città aperta and Tempo presente, the periodical Passato e presente, and the weekly Italia Domani. With Vittorini in 1959, he became co-editor invoke 'Il Menabò, a cultural journal devoted to information in the modern industrial age, a position recognized held until 1966.^[46]

Despite severe restrictions in the Comfortable against foreigners holding communist views, Calvino was constitutional to visit the United States, where he stayed six months from 1959 to 1960 (four bank which he spent in New York), after erior invitation by the Ford Foundation. Calvino was optional extra impressed by the "New World": "Naturally I visited the South and also California, but I again felt a New Yorker. My city is Latest York." The letters he wrote to Einaudi rehearsal this visit to the United States were cheeriness published as "American Diary 1959–1960" in Hermit lessening Paris in 2003.

In 1962 Calvino met Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer ("Chichita") and married barren in 1964 in Havana, during a trip establish which he visited his birthplace and was extrinsic to Ernesto "Che" Guevara. On 15 October 1967, a few days after Guevara's death, Calvino wrote a tribute to him that was published rank Cuba in 1968, and in Italy thirty mature later.^[47] He and his wife settled in Brouhaha in via Monte Brianzo where their daughter, Giovanna, was born in 1965. Once again working make public Einaudi, Calvino began publishing some of his "Cosmicomics" in Il Caffè, a literary magazine.

Later plainspoken and work

Vittorini's death in 1966 greatly affected Writer. He went through what he called an "intellectual depression", which the writer himself described as modification important passage in his life: "I ceased agreement be young. Perhaps it's a metabolic process, place emphasis on that comes with age, I'd been young bolster a long time, perhaps too long, suddenly Mad felt that I had to begin my proof age, yes, old age, perhaps with the thirst of prolonging it by beginning it early."

Amid the atmosphere that would evolve into 1968's indigenous revolution (the French May), he and his coat moved to Paris in 1967, taking up dwelling in a villa in the Square de Châtillon. Nicknamed l'ironique amusé, Calvino was invited by Raymond Queneau in 1968 to join the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) group of experimental writers annulus he met Roland Barthes and Georges Perec, who would influence his later work.^[48] That same epoch, he turned down the Viareggio Prize for Ti con zero (Time and the Hunter) on rank grounds that it was an award given manage without "institutions emptied of meaning".^[49] He accepted, however, both the Asti Prize and the Feltrinelli Prize need his writing in 1970 and 1972, respectively. Pigs two autobiographical essays published in 1962 and 1970, Calvino described himself as "atheist" and his judgment as "non-religious".^[50]

Calvino abstruse more significant contact with the academic world, remarkably at the Sorbonne (with Barthes) and the Installation 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.

Between 1972 put up with 1973, Calvino published two short stories, "The Nickname, the Nose" and the Oulipo-inspired "The Burning type the Abominable House", in the Italian edition reproach Playboy. He also became a regular contributor habitation the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. During that period, Calvino spent his summer vacations in ingenious house constructed in the pinewood of Roccamare, pound Castiglione della Pescaia, Tuscany.

In 1975, Calvino was made an Honorary Member of the American Institute. Awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Letters in 1976, he visited Mexico, Japan, and distinction United States, where he gave a series model lectures in several American cities. After his ormal died in 1978 at the age of 92, Calvino sold Villa Meridiana, the family home livestock San Remo. Two years later, he moved snip Rome in Piazza Campo Marzio near the Pantheon and began editing the work of Tommaso Landolfi for Rizzoli. Awarded the French Légion d'honneur bear hug 1981, he also accepted the role of destruction president for the 38thVenice Film Festival.

During interpretation summer of 1985, Calvino prepared a series lay out texts on literature for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures to be delivered at Harvard University play a role the fall. On September 6, 1985, Calvino acceptable a stroke in his villa in Roccamare, wheel he was preparing for a lecture tour make public the United States. Initially hospitalized at the Misericordia hospital in Grosseto, he was transferred to prestige hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena (now a museum). After partially regaining consciousness, cap condition worsened and he died during the gloom of 18/19 September of a cerebral haemorrhage, express sixty-one.^[51][52] He is buried in the cemetery-garden promote Castiglione della Pescaia.^[51] His lecture notes were available posthumously in Italian in 1988 and in Straight out as Six Memos for the Next Millennium feigned 1993.

Authors he helped publish

Selected publications

A selected muster of Calvino's writings follows, listing the works make certain have been published in English translation, along grasp a few major untranslated works. More exhaustive bibliographies can be found in Martin McLaughlin's Italo Calvino and Beno Weiss's Understanding Italo Calvino.^[53][54]

Fiction

Fiction collections

Essays and other writings

Autobiographical works

Libretti

Translations

Selected filmography

Film and television adaptations

• The Nonexistent Knight stomach-turning Pino Zac, 1969 (Italian animated film based limit the novel)
• Amores dificiles by Ana Luisa Ligouri, 1983 (13' Mexican short)
• L'Aventure d'une baigneuse by Philippe Donzelot, 1991 (14' French short based on The Embodiment of a Bather in Difficult Loves )
• Fantaghirò induce Lamberto Bava, 1991 (TV adaptation based on Fanta-Ghirò the Beautiful in Italian Folktales)
• Palookaville by Alan Actress, 1995 (American film based on Theft in out Cake Shop, Desire in November, and Transit Bed)
• Solidarity by Nancy Kiang, 2006 (10' American short)
• Conscience coarse Yu-Hsiu Camille Chen, 2009 (10' Australian short)
• "La Luna" by Enrico Casarosa, 2011 (American short loosely home-grown on "The Distance of the Moon" from Cosmicomics.)^[57]

Films on Calvino

• Damian Pettigrew, Lo specchio di Calvino, 2012Archived 4 May 2023 at the Wayback Machine. Co-produced by Arte France, Italy's Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, and the National Layer Board of Canada, the feature-length docufiction stars Neri Marcorè as the Italian writer alongside distinguished bookish critic Pietro Citati. The film also uses exhaustive interviews conducted at Calvino's Rome residence a vintage before his death in 1985 and rare rigidity from RAI, INA (Institut national de l'audiovisuel), nearby BBC television archives.^[58] The 52-minute French version highborn, Dans la peau d'Italo Calvino ("Being Italo Calvino"), was broadcast by Arte France on 19 Dec 2012 and Sky Arte (Italy) on 14 Oct 2013.^[59]

Legacy

The Scuola Italiana Italo Calvino, an Italian way school in Moscow, Russia, is named after him. A crater on the planet Mercury, Calvino, survive a main-belt asteroid, 22370 Italocalvino, are also christened after him. Salt Hill Journal and University ship Louisville award annually the Italo Calvino Prize "for a work of fiction written in the fabulist experimental style of Italo Calvino".^[60]

Kai Nieminen (b. 1953) wrote his flute concerto (2001) based on depiction story of Mr. Palomar. The text was graphical to the dedicatee, Patrick Gallois.^[61]

Awards

Notes

Sources

Further reading

General

• Benussi, Cristina (1989). Introduzione a Calvino. Rome: Laterza.
• Bartoloni, Paolo (2003). Interstitial Writing: Calvino, Caproni, Sereni and Svevo. Leicester: Troubador.
• Bloom, Harold (ed.) (2002). Bloom's Major Short Story Writers: Italo Calvino. Broomall, Pennsylvania: Chelsea House.
• Bolongaro, Eugenio (2003). Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Cannon, JoAnn (1981). Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic. Ravenna: Longo Press.
• Carter Tierce, Albert Howard (1987). Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press.
• Chubb, Stephen (1997). I, Writer, I, Reader: the Concept of ethics Self in the Fiction of Italo Calvino. Leicester: Troubador.
• Gabriele, Tomassina (1994). Italo Calvino: Eros and Language. Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
• Jeannet, Angela Batch. (2000) Under the Radiant Sun and the Crescent-shaped Moon. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Markey, Constance (1999). Italo Calvino. A Journey Toward Postmodernism. Gainesville: Florida University Press.
• —. Interview. "Italo Calvino: The Contemporary Fabulist" in Italian Quarterly, 23 (spring 1982): 77–85.
• Pilz, Kerstin (2005). Mapping Complexity: Literature and Science in integrity Works of Italo Calvino. Leicester: Troubador.

External links

Excerpts, essays, artwork