Italo Calvino

Born on October 15, 1923, in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, where his father, a tropical agronomist, and his mother, a botanist, were both engaged in agricultural research, Italo Calvino was brought to Italy before his second birthday. He grew up in Sanremo on the Ligurian coast, surrounded by the experimental fruits his father cultivated: avocados, grapefruits, and exotic flowers. In 1943, at twenty, he refused conscription into the Fascist army and joined the Garibaldi Brigades of the Italian Resistance, fighting for twenty months in the Maritime Alps under the nom de guerre "Santiago," after his Cuban birthplace. His first novel, The Path to the Spiders' Nests (1947), drew directly on this partisan experience. The Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, and The Nonexistent Knight, established his reputation for philosophical fable. Cosmicomics (1965) turned the history of the universe into playful short fiction. Invisible Cities (1972) reimagined Marco Polo's conversations with Kublai Khan, and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979) became the postmodern novel par excellence. He joined the Oulipo group, the Parisian workshop of constrained writing, and was the most translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death. In the summer of 1985 he was preparing his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for Harvard, published posthumously as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, when he suffered a stroke at his villa in Roccamare. He died in Siena on September 19, 1985, at sixty-one, leaving the sixth memo unwritten.

In 1941, to please his botanist parents, Calvino enrolled in the Agriculture Faculty at the University of Turin, the same faculty where his father lectured. He passed four exams that first year. Secretly, though, he was reading Pavese, Vittorini, and Montale, nursing a literary vocation his family knew nothing about.