Italo Calvino Biography

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best-known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories. He was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death.

Italo Calvino Age

He was born on 15 October 1923, Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba. Birth sign not known. Died on 19 September 1985, while he was 61 years old.

Italo Calvino Nationality

He was from Italy

Italo Calvino Education

He 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.”

ITALO CALVINO

Italo Calvino Family

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.

Since he wound 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 relating to poverty and the working class and was “ill at ease” with his parents’ openness to the laborers who filed into his father’s study on Saturdays to receive their weekly paycheck.

Italo Calvino World War II

His mother encouraged him to enter the Italian Resistance in the name of “natural justice and family virtues”.Using the battle name of “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 wrote of his mother’s ordeal that “she was an example of tenacity and courage.  behaving with dignity and firmness before the and the Fascist militia, and in her long detention as a hostage.

Not least when the blackshirts three times pretended to shoot my father in front of her eyes. The historical events which mothers take part in acquire the greatness and invincibility of natural phenomena.”

Italo Calvino Writtings Career

In 1947, he graduated with a Master’s thesis on Joseph Conrad, wrote short stories in his spare time, and landed a job in the publicity department at the Einaudi publishing house run by Giulio Einaudi. Although brief, his stint put him in regular contact with Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Norberto Bobbio, and many other left-wing intellectuals and writers. He then left Einaudi to work as a journalist for the official Communist daily, and the newborn Communist political magazine, Rinascita. During this period, Pavese and poet Alfonso Gatto were Calvino’s closest friends and mentors.

His first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders written with valuable editorial advice from Pavese, won the Premio Riccione on publication in 1947. With sales topping 5000 copies, a surprise success in postwar Italy, the novel inaugurated Calvino’s neorealist period. In a clairvoyant essay, Pavese praised the young writer as a “squirrel of the pen” who “climbed into the trees, more for fun than fear, to observe partisan life as a fable of the forest”. In 1948, he interviewed one of his literary idols, Ernest Hemingway, traveling with Natalia Ginzburg to his home in Stresa.

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. During the eighteen months it took to complete, Youth in Turin, he made an important self-discovery: “I began doing what came most naturally to me – that is, following the memory of the things I had loved best since boyhood. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic.

Italo Calvino Major Works

*The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947)

*Italian Folktales(1956)

*Invisible Cities(1972)

*If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller(1979)

*Mr. Palomar(1983)

Italo Calvino International Recognition and Honors

His three most regarded novels: Invisible Cities, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. During this period he and Chiquita became the parents of a daughter whom they named Giovana. After his move to Paris, Calvino’s work began to show a wider range of influences.

A reconciliation with his father, which is treated in the short story “La Strada di San Giovanni”, 1990 translated in The Road to San Giovanni, 1993, gave him the freedom to explore and embrace a scientific perspective more vigorously, honing it into an attitude that blended humanist innocence and scientific wonder.

Calvino worked on the book The Castle of Crossed Destinies periodically for several years. In the 1973 postscript to The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Calvino writes about the double origin of the work. The idea first came to him in 1968 while he was attending an international seminar in which one of the participants spoke of fortune-telling with cards.

Calvino first won international recognition as a major writer with Invisible Cities, which some critics consider to be his most perfect work. The book has a carefully defined mathematical structure that displays its author’s abiding interest in symmetries and parallels.

Calvino’s readers had to wait six years for his next book If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979). As if to mockingly reassure his public of the authenticity of the book, he begins by stating, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

Described by Salman Rushdie “the most outrageous fiction about fiction ever conceived,” the novel comprises the beginnings of ten other novels to emerge as a constantly mutating parody of literary genres.

Italo Calvino Famous Contemporaries

*Salvador Dali (1904-1989). A Spanish surrealist painter.

*Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet also known for his outspoken communism.

*Roland Barthes (1915-1980) French Literary critic and philosopher.

*Claude Levi-Strauss (1908) French anthropologist who developed the idea of structuralism as a method for understanding society.

*Ernesto ”Che” Guevara (1928-1967) Marxist revolutionary and guerilla leader.

Italo Calvino Net worth

His net worth is currently under review

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