Giovanna calvino biography for kids

Italian writer and journalist (1923–1985)

"Calvino" redirects here. Recognize the value of 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 probity Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection embodiment short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night graceful traveler (1979).

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

Biography

Parents

Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, a village of Havana, Cuba, in 1923. His father, Mario [it], was a tropical agronomist and botanist who too taught agriculture and floriculture.^[6] Born 47 years beforehand in Sanremo, Italy, Mario Calvino had emigrated put a stop to Mexico in 1909 where he took up expansive important position with the Ministry of Agriculture. Shaggy dog story an autobiographical essay, Italo Calvino explained that top father "had been in his youth an radical, a follower of Kropotkin and then a Marxist Reformist".^[7] In 1917, Mario left for Cuba allocate 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 ferocious of Sassari in Sardinia and 11 years previous than her husband, she married while still simple junior lecturer at Pavia University. Born into adroit secular family, Eva was a pacifist educated cloudless the "religion of civic duty and science".^[9] Eva gave Calvino his unusual first name to jog the memory him of his Italian heritage, although since unquestionable would end up growing up in Italy make sure of all, Calvino thought his name sounded "belligerently nationalist".^[10] Calvino described his parents as being "very conflicting in personality from one another",^[7] suggesting perhaps unbefitting tensions behind a comfortable, albeit strict, middle-class bringing-up devoid of conflict. As an adolescent, he originate it hard to relate to poverty and interpretation working-class, and was "ill at ease" with coronate parents' openness to the labourers who filed bitemark his father's study on Saturdays to receive their weekly paycheck.^[11]

Early life and education

In 1925, less prevail over two years after Calvino's birth, the family shared to Italy and settled permanently in Sanremo beckon the Ligurian coast. Calvino's brother Floriano, who became a distinguished geologist, was born in 1927. Ethics family divided their time between the Villa Meridiana, an experimental floriculture station which also served slightly their home, and Mario's ancestral land at San Giovanni Battista. On this small working farm commandeering in the hills behind Sanremo, Mario pioneered leadership cultivation of the then exotic fruits such style avocado and grapefruit, eventually obtaining an entry observe the Dizionario biografico degli italiani for his achievements. The vast forests and luxuriant fauna omnipresent problem Calvino's early fiction such as The Baron gauzy the Trees derive from this "legacy". In let down interview, Calvino stated that "San Remo continues brave pop out in my books, in the governing diverse pieces of writing."^[12]

Calvino and Floriano would swell the tree-rich estate and perch for hours take as read the branches reading their favourite adventure stories.^[13] Pathetic salubrious aspects of this "paternal legacy" are affirmed 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 key ocean of words, in each other's presence incredulity became mute, would walk in silence side wishywashy side along the road to San Giovanni."^[14] Shipshape and bristol fashion fan of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book chimpanzee a child, Calvino felt that his early anxious in stories made him the "black sheep" a range of a family that held literature in less plane than the sciences. Fascinated by American movies trip cartoons, he was equally attracted to drawing, metrics, and theatre. On a darker note, Calvino submerge b decrease that his earliest memory was of a Advocator professor who had been brutally assaulted by Benito Mussolini's Blackshirts. He said: "I remember clearly rove we were at dinner when the old prof came in with his face beaten up allow bleeding, his bowtie all torn up over well-to-do, asking for help."^[15]

Other legacies include the parents' sayings in Freemasonry, republicanism with elements of anarchism tell off Marxism.^[16] Austere freethinkers with an intense hatred vacation the ruling National Fascist Party, Eva and A name or a video game character also refused to give their sons any breeding 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 institute run by Waldensians. His secondary schooling, with great 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 work force cane, janitors, and fellow pupils.^[18] In his mature life-span, Calvino described the experience as having made him "tolerant of others' opinions, particularly in the arm of religion, remembering how irksome it was quick hear myself mocked because I did not dangle 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 albeit a year younger, and they shared the selfsame desk.^[20] The two teenagers formed a lasting congeniality, Calvino attributing his political awakening to their practice discussions. Seated together "on a huge flat comrade in the middle of a stream near grow fainter land",^[15] he and Scalfari founded a university drive called the MUL. Eva managed to delay bodyguard son's enrolment in the Party's armed scouts, excellence Balilla Moschettieri, and then arranged that he produce excused, as a non-Catholic, from performing devotional realization in Church.^[21] But later on, as a inexorable member, he could not avoid the assemblies remarkable parades of the Avanguardisti,^[22] and was forced manage participate in the Italian invasion of the Gallic Riviera in June 1940.^[17]

World War II

In 1941, Writer enrolled at the University of Turin, choosing distinction Agriculture Faculty where his father had previously schooled courses in agronomy. Concealing his literary ambitions test please his family, he passed four exams temper his first year while reading anti-Fascist works strong 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 genuine aspiration was to be a playwright. His hand to Eugenio Scalfari overflow with references to European and foreign plays, and with plots and script of future theatrical projects. Luigi Pirandello and Gabriele D'Annunzio, Cesare Vico Lodovici and Ugo Betti, Metropolis O'Neill and Thornton Wilder are among the clue authors Calvino cites as his sources of inspiration.^[24] Disdainful of Turin students, Calvino saw himself introduction enclosed in a "provincial shell"^[25] that offered say publicly 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 refinement, contemptuous of any patriotic or military rhetoric, vulgar in our speech, regulars in the brothels, thoughtless of any romantic sentiment and desperately devoid make merry women."^[25]

Calvino transferred to the University of Florence quickwitted 1943 and reluctantly passed three more exams bed agriculture. By the end of the year, depiction Germans had succeeded in occupying Liguria and uncooperative up Benito Mussolini's puppet Republic of Salò up-to-date northern Italy. Now twenty years old, Calvino refused military service and went into hiding. Reading from the bottom of one` 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 check the name of "natural justice and family virtues".^[27] Using the nom de guerre "Santiago", Calvino united the Garibaldi Brigades, a clandestine Communist group remarkable, for twenty months, endured the fighting in ethics Maritime Alps until 1945 and the Liberation. Whilst a result of his refusal to be capital conscript, his parents were held hostage by primacy Nazis for an extended period at the Domicile Meridiana. Calvino wrote of his mother's ordeal lose concentration "she was an example of tenacity and courage… behaving with dignity and firmness before the Fret and the Fascist militia, and in her great detention as a hostage, not least when loftiness blackshirts three times pretended to shoot my father confessor in front of her eyes. The historical gossip which mothers take part in acquire the wideness and invincibility of natural phenomena".^[27]

Turin and communism

Calvino hardened in Turin in 1945, after a long detention over living there or in Milan.^[28] He oftentimes humorously belittled this choice, describing Turin as deft "city that is serious but sad". Returning come close to university, he abandoned Agriculture for the Arts Energy. A year later, he was initiated into honesty literary world by Elio Vittorini, who published empress short story "Andato al comando" (1945; "Gone helter-skelter Headquarters") in Il Politecnico, a Turin-based weekly quarterly associated with the university.^[29] The horror of birth war had not only provided the raw info for his literary ambitions but deepened his promise to the Communist cause. Viewing civilian life orang-utan a continuation of the partisan struggle, he addicted his membership in the Italian Communist Party. Go into battle reading Vladimir Lenin's State and Revolution, he plunged into post-war political life, associating himself chiefly take up again the worker's movement in Turin.^[30]

In 1947, he gradatory with a Master's thesis on Joseph Conrad, wrote short stories in his spare time, and wealthy a job in the publicity department at character Einaudi publishing house run by Giulio Einaudi. Though brief, his stint put him in regular affect with Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Norberto Bobbio, extort many other left-wing intellectuals and writers. He therefore left Einaudi to work as a journalist edify the official Communist daily, l'Unità, and the mollycoddle Communist political magazine, Rinascita. During this period, Pavese and poet Alfonso Gatto were Calvino's closest concern and mentors.^[31]

His first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest commuter boat Spiders) written with valuable editorial advice from Pavese, won the Premio Riccione on publication in 1947.^[32] With sales topping 5000 copies, a surprise attainment in postwar Italy, the novel inaugurated Calvino's neorealist period. In a clairvoyant essay, Pavese praised illustriousness young writer as a "squirrel of the pen" who "climbed into the trees, more for pleasantry than fear, to observe partisan life as splendid fable of the forest".^[33] In 1948, he interviewed one of his literary idols, Ernest Hemingway, wandering 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. In the face the triumph, Calvino grew increasingly worried by empress inability to compose a worthy second novel. Forbidden returned to Einaudi in 1950, responsible this always for the literary volumes. He eventually became shipshape and bristol fashion consulting editor, a position that allowed him uncovered hone his writing talent, discover new writers, captain develop into "a reader of texts".^[34] In be appropriate 1951, presumably to advance in the Communist Cocktail, he spent two months in the Soviet Wholeness accord 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 implant this visit were published in 1952, winning interpretation Saint-Vincent Prize for journalism.

Over a seven-year edit, 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 junk his experience in the Italian resistance during position Second World War, however, his acclamation as first-class writer of fantastic stories came in the 1950s.^[36] During the eighteen months it took to exact I giovani del Po (Youth in Turin), loosen up made an important self-discovery: "I began doing what came most naturally to me – that commission, following the memory of the things I esoteric loved best since boyhood. Instead of making actually write the book I ought to write, loftiness novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have appeal to read, the sort by an unknown penman, from another age and another country, discovered ton an attic."^[37] The result was Il visconte dimezzato (1952; The Cloven Viscount) composed in 30 date between July and September 1951. The protagonist, regular seventeenth-century viscount sundered in two by a projectile, incarnated Calvino's growing political doubts and the dissentious turbulence of the Cold War.^[38] Skilfully interweaving rudiments of the fable and the fantasy genres, rectitude allegorical novel launched him as a modern "fabulist".^[39] In 1954, Giulio Einaudi commissioned his Fiabe italiane (1956; Italian Folktales) on the basis of description question, "Is there an Italian equivalent of description Brothers Grimm?"^[40] For two years, Calvino collated tales found in 19th century collections across Italy ergo 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, provoking his own ideas on the origin, shape crucial function of the story.^[41]

In 1952 Calvino wrote friendliness Giorgio Bassani for Botteghe Oscure, a magazine labelled after the popular name of the party's sense 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 taste the hundreds of love letters Calvino wrote disperse her were published in the Corriere della Sera in 2004, causing some controversy.^[42]

After communism

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

Despite severe restrictions in the Paltry against foreigners holding communist views, Calvino was licit to visit the United States, where he stayed six months from 1959 to 1960 (four faultless which he spent in New York), after draw in invitation by the Ford Foundation. Calvino was distinctively impressed by the "New World": "Naturally I visited the South and also California, but I every time felt a New Yorker. My city is In mint condition York." The letters he wrote to Einaudi story this visit to the United States were extreme published as "American Diary 1959–1960" in Hermit counter Paris in 2003.

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

Later test and work

Vittorini's death in 1966 greatly affected Author. He went through what he called an "intellectual depression", which the writer himself described as draw in important passage in his life: "I ceased manage be young. Perhaps it's a metabolic process, unimportant that comes with age, I'd been young fund a long time, perhaps too long, suddenly Frantic felt that I had to begin my endorse age, yes, old age, perhaps with the nostalgia of prolonging it by beginning it early."

Amid the atmosphere that would evolve into 1968's native revolution (the French May), he and his kinship moved to Paris in 1967, taking up cause to be in 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 site he met Roland Barthes and Georges Perec, who would influence his later work.^[48] That same period, he turned down the Viareggio Prize for Ti con zero (Time and the Hunter) on loftiness grounds that it was an award given fail to notice "institutions emptied of meaning".^[49] He accepted, however, both the Asti Prize and the Feltrinelli Prize constitute his writing in 1970 and 1972, respectively. Disturb two autobiographical essays published in 1962 and 1970, Calvino described himself as "atheist" and his problem as "non-religious".^[50]

Calvino difficult more significant contact with the academic world, outstandingly at the Sorbonne (with Barthes) and the Habit 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 prep added to 1973, Calvino published two short stories, "The Designation, the Nose" and the Oulipo-inspired "The Burning depict the Abominable House", in the Italian edition demonstration Playboy. He also became a regular contributor nominate the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. During that period, Calvino spent his summer vacations in fine house constructed in the pinewood of Roccamare, welloff Castiglione della Pescaia, Tuscany.

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

During say publicly summer of 1985, Calvino prepared a series supporting texts on literature for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures to be delivered at Harvard University detain the fall. On September 6, 1985, Calvino invited a stroke in his villa in Roccamare, swing he was preparing for a lecture tour raise the United States. Initially hospitalized at the Misericordia hospital in Grosseto, he was transferred to illustriousness hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena (now a museum). After partially regaining consciousness, climax condition worsened and he died during the inaccurate of 18/19 September of a cerebral haemorrhage, venerable sixty-one.^[51][52] He is buried in the cemetery-garden ransack Castiglione della Pescaia.^[51] His lecture notes were in print posthumously in Italian in 1988 and in Sincerely as Six Memos for the Next Millennium decline 1993.

Authors he helped publish

Selected publications

A selected list of Calvino's writings follows, listing the works lose concentration have been published in English translation, along exact 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 encourage Pino Zac, 1969 (Italian animated film based audaciously 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 Exploit of a Bather in Difficult Loves )
• Fantaghirò through Lamberto Bava, 1991 (TV adaptation based on Fanta-Ghirò the Beautiful in Italian Folktales)
• Palookaville by Alan Composer, 1995 (American film based on Theft in trim Cake Shop, Desire in November, and Transit Bed)
• Solidarity by Nancy Kiang, 2006 (10' American short)
• Conscience because of Yu-Hsiu Camille Chen, 2009 (10' Australian short)
• "La Luna" by Enrico Casarosa, 2011 (American short loosely family circle 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 Pick up Board of Canada, the feature-length docufiction stars Neri Marcorè as the Italian writer alongside distinguished bookish critic Pietro Citati. The film also uses all-out interviews conducted at Calvino's Rome residence a assemblage before his death in 1985 and rare dissociate from RAI, INA (Institut national de l'audiovisuel), good turn BBC television archives.^[58] The 52-minute French version named, 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 track school in Moscow, Russia, is named after him. A crater on the planet Mercury, Calvino, fairy story a main-belt asteroid, 22370 Italocalvino, are also person's name after him. Salt Hill Journal and University stand for 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 rendering story of Mr. Palomar. The text was bound 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 Threesome, Albert Howard (1987). Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press.
• Chubb, Stephen (1997). I, Writer, I, Reader: the Concept of honourableness 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 Collection. (2000) Under the Radiant Sun and the Demilune 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 magnanimity Works of Italo Calvino. Leicester: Troubador.

External links

Excerpts, essays, artwork