Background
Calvino was born on October 15, 1923, in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, the son of Italian agronomists, but was brought up in Italy.
Calvino was born on October 15, 1923, in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, the son of Italian agronomists, but was brought up in Italy.
Italo 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.
After preparatory school, Calvino enrolled in the Faculty of Science at the University of Turin.
The lush vegetation of the San Remo area and his extensive knowledge of local flora are reflected in many of Calvino's writings.
However, soon after his matriculation, Calvino received orders to join the Italian Army.
He began writing for left-wing papers and journals.
Calvino also began to record his war experiences in stories that eventually became his highly acclaimed first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947).
In 1947 he began work as an editor at the Italian publishing house of Einaudi.
In the 1950's he gradually turned away from realistic writing.
They also invited him to join the staff of their new publishing house, Enaudi.
He accepted and remained affiliated with Enaudi all his life. However, Calvino's next books were very different.
Influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure stories and the symbolism of the poet Eugenio Montale, he published a short tale, Il visconte dimezzato (1952; The Cloven Viscount, 1962), a medieval fantasy about violence and political depravity.
In the late 1960's he moved to Paris as a representative of Einaudi, where he became interested in structuralism and semantics.
In The Cloven Viscount (1952) Calvino depicts a soldierhalved by a cannonball during a crusade.
His two halves return to play opposing roles in his native village.
Calvino compiled a complete and authoritative collection of 200 folk tales from all regions and dialects of Italy.
The Watcher, a collection of three short stories, was published in 1963.
In his writing Calvino continued to "search for new forms to suit realities ignored by most writers. "
In 1983 Mr. Palomar was completed.
Calvino turned this novel into a dramatization of a mathematical formula categorizing the actions of the title character, named for the famous observatory, at a seaside resort.
The semiotic theory of signs, symbols, and codes is also evident in Le cittàcitta invisibili (1972; Invisible Cities, 1974), which is based on Marco Polo's travels from Venice to China and was influenced by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations.
The Road to San Giovanni, five autobiographical essays, was published posthumously (1993).
During the two years that Germany occupied Italy (1943 - 1945) Calvino lived as a partisan in the woods of the Alpi Maritime region fighting both German and Italian fascists. At the war's end in 1945, Calvino joined the Communist Party.
He resigned from the Communist Party, tired of writing tracts for Communist periodicals and disillusioned by the spread of dogmatic Stalinism and the savage crushing of the Hungarian revolt of 1956.
From 1955 to 1958 Calvino had an affair with Italian actress Elsa De Giorgi, a married, older woman. Excerpts of the hundreds of love letters Calvino wrote to her were published in the Corriere della Sera in 2004, causing some controversy.
In 1962 Calvino met Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer ("Chichita") and married to her in 1964 in Havana, during a trip in which he visited his birthplace and was introduced to Ernesto "Che" Guevara. He and his wife settled in Rome in the via Monte Brianzo where their daughter, Giovanna, was born in 1965.