Italo Calvino

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Why read the classics?

If On A Winter’s Night a Traveller, Marcovaldo & Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino: A BBC Radio Collection

Dramatisations of Calvino’s most famous works, starring Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook, plus bonus programmes 
 
Italo Calvino was one of the 20th Century's great experimenters, who consistently pushed the boundaries of literature. His works ranged from fantasy and science fiction to folktales and neo-realism, but he is best known for If on a winter’s night a traveller, Marcovaldo and Invisible Cities. Radio adaptations of all three are collected here, alongside a comic short story by Calvino and two illuminating programmes about his ideas and writing. 
 
If on a winter’s night a traveller – Relax. Concentrate. Turn off your phone. You are about to listen to a radio adaptation of If on a winter’s night a traveller… Enter a labyrinth of ingeniously inventive audio worlds as you, the listener, turn detective in your attempts to get to the heart of the story. Prepare to become embroiled in a trans-global conspiracy of rogue translators, lost languages and disintegrating publishing houses, and be plunged into an epic caper of disappearance, double crosses and beautiful, authentic romance… Toby Jones, Indira Varma and Tim Crouch star in this reimagining of Calvino’s iconic, metafictional masterpiece. 
 
Marcovaldo – These five tales, adapted by Toby Jones from Calvino's enchanting short story collection, centre around Marcovaldo, a poor rural man living with his family in a big city in northern Italy. Included are Mushrooms in the City, Moon and Gnac, The Rain and the Leaves, The Wrong Stop and Smoke, Wind and Soap Bubbles, starring Toby Jones as the Narrator and Mackenzie Crook as Marcovaldo. 
 
Invisible Cities – Cecilia, Eusapia, Zobeide, Maurilia … Are these exotic, faraway places or just different names for the great Metropolis we all inhabit? Perhaps they are reflections of our own state of mind? In Claire Benedict’s readings from Calvino’s playful, profound novel, we voyage through the avenues and alleyways of his invisible cities – hidden cities, dead cities and cities which never end... 
 
Desire in November – Elderly porter Barbagallo’s search for winter clothes takes him into the salons of the rich – but what can Fabrizia’s furriers offer him? Tim Piggott-Smith reads this whimsical short story. 
 
Open Book: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities – Lauren Elkin and Darran Anderson take us on a tour of the imagined cities in Calvino’s seminal work, a majestic prose-poem in which a fictional Marco Polo recalls his own intrepid travels. 
 
Three Italian Writers: Italo Calvino – Paul Bailey looks at the life and career of the prolific writer described by a contemporary as 'the squirrel with the pen’, and reflects on his inexhaustible supply of ideas, allusions and visions. With readings by Benjamin Whitrow. 
 
© 2025 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2025 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Dramatisations of Calvino’s most famous works, starring Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook, plus bonus programmes 
 
Italo Calvino was one of the 20th Century's great experimenters, who consistently pushed the boundaries of literature. His works ranged from fantasy and science fiction to folktales and neo-realism, but he is best known for If on a winter’s night a traveller, Marcovaldo and Invisible Cities. Radio adaptations of all three are collected here, alongside a comic short story by Calvino and two illuminating programmes about his ideas and writing. 
 
If on a winter’s night a traveller – Relax. Concentrate. Turn off your phone. You are about to listen to a radio adaptation of If on a winter’s night a traveller… Enter a labyrinth of ingeniously inventive audio worlds as you, the listener, turn detective in your attempts to get to the heart of the story. Prepare to become embroiled in a trans-global conspiracy of rogue translators, lost languages and disintegrating publishing houses, and be plunged into an epic caper of disappearance, double crosses and beautiful, authentic romance… Toby Jones, Indira Varma and Tim Crouch star in this reimagining of Calvino’s iconic, metafictional masterpiece. 
 
Marcovaldo – These five tales, adapted by Toby Jones from Calvino's enchanting short story collection, centre around Marcovaldo, a poor rural man living with his family in a big city in northern Italy. Included are Mushrooms in the City, Moon and Gnac, The Rain and the Leaves, The Wrong Stop and Smoke, Wind and Soap Bubbles, starring Toby Jones as the Narrator and Mackenzie Crook as Marcovaldo. 
 
Invisible Cities – Cecilia, Eusapia, Zobeide, Maurilia … Are these exotic, faraway places or just different names for the great Metropolis we all inhabit? Perhaps they are reflections of our own state of mind? In Claire Benedict’s readings from Calvino’s playful, profound novel, we voyage through the avenues and alleyways of his invisible cities – hidden cities, dead cities and cities which never end... 
 
Desire in November – Elderly porter Barbagallo’s search for winter clothes takes him into the salons of the rich – but what can Fabrizia’s furriers offer him? Tim Piggott-Smith reads this whimsical short story. 
 
Open Book: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities – Lauren Elkin and Darran Anderson take us on a tour of the imagined cities in Calvino’s seminal work, a majestic prose-poem in which a fictional Marco Polo recalls his own intrepid travels. 
 
Three Italian Writers: Italo Calvino – Paul Bailey looks at the life and career of the prolific writer described by a contemporary as 'the squirrel with the pen’, and reflects on his inexhaustible supply of ideas, allusions and visions. With readings by Benjamin Whitrow. 
 
© 2025 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2025 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Under the Jaguar Sun

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 
 
I went down, I climbed back up into the light of the jaguar sun – into the sea of the green sap of the leaves. The world spun, I plunged down, my throat cut by the knife of the king-priest … The solar energy coursed along dense networks of blood and chlorophyll; I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibres that absorb the sun

Italo Calvino (Author) Italo Calvino (1923-1985), one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. His major works include Cosmicomics (1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). He died in Siena in 1985.

I went down, I climbed back up into the light of the jaguar sun – into the sea of the green sap of the leaves. The world spun, I plunged down, my throat cut by the knife of the king-priest … The solar energy coursed along dense networks of blood and chlorophyll; I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that absorb the sun

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

A special edition of the classic genre-defying novel

A novel built from beginnings... 
 
You buy a book called If On A Winter’s Night a Traveller and sit down to read. The story stops mid-sentence. When you find another copy, it contains a different opening. Each attempt to continue leads to a new narrative that breaks off just as it gathers momentum. 
 
As the Reader, you set out to track down the missing text. Along the way you encounter Ludmilla, another reader pursuing the same vanished book. What follows is a sequence of interrupted stories: thrillers, romances, political intrigues, each complete in its promise but not in its conclusion. 
 
This novel turns reading itself into the central drama. The search for the next chapter becomes the plot. Every ending leads back to another beginning. 
 
'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell 
 
'A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction' Guardian 
 
VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful

A beautiful hardback edition of Calvino's genre-switching masterwork. A book of surprise and adventure but you, the reader, are the hero. 
 
You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But alas there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero is you, the reader. 
 
'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell 
 
'A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction' Guardian 
 
VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful

Marcovaldo

A poor city worker keeps seeking pockets of nature in modern urban life, with comic and sometimes disastrous results. Marcovaldo is poor, hopeful and unusually alert to the natural world. In the modern Italian city where he lives with his family, he searches for mushrooms, fresh air, moonlight, birds, fish, rest and small enchantments among streets, factories, neon and supermarkets. Each attempt turns comic, tender or disastrous. A cure becomes a problem, a picnic becomes a misadventure, a glimpse of beauty becomes another collision with modern life. Across twenty seasonal stories, Italo Calvino turns one working man’s hunger for nature into a series of sharp, playful fables about poverty, urban living and imagination. Marcovaldo is a classic short story cycle for readers looking for translated Italian fiction, literary comedy, social satire and magical everyday strangeness. Funny, melancholy and ingenious, it shows Calvino at his most accessible and quietly subversive. 'Delightful and rewarding as always' Observer. 'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

Calvino is surely among the handful of living writers that can be called, without hesitation, great. Each book by Calvino is a completely original conception. Marcovaldo is one of the best works of fiction published

The greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century

It is the refinement, the oddness and the humour of the thoughts he gets which make Calvino a rare pleasure to read; he is a match for Borges as he stealthily patrols the limits of the unthinkable

He will continue to glitter, this strange, lonely prospector in the universe of words, well into the next millennium and after, a master in the empire of the imagination

What is so much admired by the readers of Mr. Calvino's later Invisible Cities was already at work in Marcovaldo and with a more cogent narrative drive... Marcovaldo conveys the sensuous, tangible qualities of life

Marcovaldo is an enchanting collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. Calvino charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider. As always with Calvino, nothing is quite as it seems. 
 
'Delightful and rewarding as always' Observer 
 
'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

Difficult Loves and Other Stories

A beautifully translated collection of early stories by the highly regarded Italian writer. The earliest were written in 1945 when Calvino was twenty-two and the latest date from the 1950s when he was in his early thirties. The quirkiness and the grace of the writing, the originality of the imagination at work, the incandescence of vision, make this collection well worth reading, and for more than archaeological reasons

A spectacular display of this key European writer's early work 
 
This dazzling collection of stories follows the individual adventures of a varied cast of characters and masterfully illustrates Calvino's unique perspective and narrative gifts. As well as the thirteen tales from his Difficult Loves collection this volume also includes 'Smog', 'A Plunge into Real Estate' and 'The Argentine Ant'. 
 
'The quirkiness and grace of the writing, the originality of the imagination at work, the occasional incandescence of vision, and a certain loveable nuttiness make this collection well worth reading' Margaret Atwood 
 
'If this is not a masterpiece of twentieth-century prose writing, I cannot think of anything better' Gore Vidal on 'The Argentine Ant'

Mr Palomar

Here, Calvino, probably Italy's leading novelist before he died, focuses a probing eye on one man's attempt to name the parts of his universe, almost as though Mr Palomar were trying to define and explain his own existence. Where the Palomar telescope points out into space, Mr Palomar points in: walking the beach, visiting the zoo, strolling in his garden. Each brief chapter reads like an exploded haiku, with Mr Palomar reading an universe into the proverbial grain of sand

Beautifully nimble, solitary feats of imagination

Calvino represents a high point of literary evolution; his skill is immense but retains a simian agility. As ever, his gaze is crystal clear and his writing has the easy beauty of clarity.

Mr Palomar is a delightful eccentric whose chief activity is looking at things. He is seeking knowledge; 'it is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you can venture to seek what is underneath'. Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, a woman sunbathing topless or a flight of migrant starlings, Mr Palomar's observations render the world afresh. 
 
'Beautifully nimble, solitary feats of imagination' Seamus Heaney 
 
'Beguiling' Time

Our Ancestors

Viscount Medardo is bisected by a Turkish cannonball, Baron Cosimo retires to the trees for the rest of his days, and Agiluf the Knight is an empty suit of armour. 
 
Our Ancestors brings together three surreal novellas set in distinct historical worlds across medieval and early modern Europe. In The Cloven Viscount, a nobleman returns from war as two separate beings, one cruel and one impossibly virtuous, leaving his community to suffer the consequences. 
 
In The Baron in the Trees, a young aristocrat climbs into the branches of the Italian Riviera and refuses to touch the ground again, living out his life among the leaves while history moves below him. 
 
In The Nonexistent Knight, a suit of armour fights in the army of Charlemagne, sustained only by will and duty. 
 
Our Ancestors blends satire with fable, exploring how power, war and social expectation shape the self. 
 
'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

Calvino's refusal to be glum set him apart from other modernists. His marvellous Fifties trilogy, Our Ancestors, brought us allegorical fables about a cloven viscount, a non-existent knight and a baron who swings from the trees

Calvino's genius lies not so much in this tantalising conceit, but the brilliance and ingenuity with which he pulls it off...A dazzling display of literary fireworks

The writing is just breathtaking and the final story, 'The Non-Existent Knight', still sends a shiver up my spine

Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries, as they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found that special place but learnt how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere

Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before.This is highly unnerving: fortunately you're usually too busy laughing to go mad... I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends

One of the greatest tale-spinners of modern times

A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction

Italo Calvino (Author, Introducer) 
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. One of the most respected writers of the twentieth century, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985. A collection of Calvino's posthumous personal writings, The Hermit in Paris, was published in 2003.

Viscount Medardo is bisected by a Turkish cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; Baron Cosimo, at the age of twelve, retires to the trees for the rest of his days; Charlemagne's knight, Agiluf, is an empty suit of armour. These three vivid images are the points of departure for Calvino's classic triptych of moral tales, now published in one volume and all displaying the exuberant talent of a master storyteller. 
 
'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

Last Comes the Raven

In these beautifully translated stories, the quality of the writing emerges as clearly as do the ease and range of his inventiveness. Calvino's special gift is to link the physical and immediate with an allegorical timelessness. All the characters and creatures in these stories conspire to convey a feeling of the wonder, mystery and terror of life

Calvino's strength is his economy and subtlety. The best of his allegorical fantasies have the power of the Brothers Grimm, rollicking stories on the surface, with an underlying savagery

Calvino was drawn to narratives as pure and potent objects; in this collection, he examines but does not deconstruct them . . . There is the author's trademark ironic distance and careful wit, as well as tinges of surrealism. But, where the mature Calvino found a style that was supremely arch, alien, and spare, his more mimetic stories retain the funk of the human . . . The reader of Last Comes the Raven registers a bloom of social feelings: sympathy, recognition, curiosity

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. One of the most respected writers of the twentieth century, his best-known works of fiction include Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Marcovaldo and Mr Palomar. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985. A collection of Calvino's posthumous personal writings, The Hermit in Paris, was published in 2003.

These early short stories brim with the beauty of the Italian countryside and seaside, telling tales both sumptuous and unnerving. 
 
Calvino's war-torn Italy is vivid, intense, almost hyper-real. A trio of greedy burglars rob a pastry shop, a boy offers a girl presents of toads and insects from the garden, a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In every story he reveals the hidden meaning beneath the surface of everyday life, and the ludicrousness of war. 
 
Some stories from Last Comes the Raven have been previously available in the collection Adam, One Afternoon. This new expanded collection includes several stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein and is an important addition to Calvino's legacy. 
 
'In Last Comes the Raven, a collection of early stories, we find the man behind the magician' New Yorker

Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose... The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island

Whole chapters of unforced poetic prose in which insight and fantasy are perfectly matched-an exquisite world

'Invisible Cities is perhaps his most beautiful work-the artist seems to have made peace with the tension between man's ideas of the many and the one

The most beautiful of his books throws up ideas, allusions, and breathtaking imaginative insights on almost every page. Each time he returns from his travels, Marco Polo is invited by Kublai Khan to describe the cities he has visited-Although he makes Marco Polo summon up many cities for the Khan's imagination to feed on, Calvino is describing only one city in this book. Venice, that decaying heap of incomparable splendour, still stands as substantial evidence of man's ability to create something perfect out of chaos

So important for thinking about the rich layers of life around us, our frailties, how we question and how we find meaning.

Of all the Italian post-war novelists, Italo Calvino is the adventurer. He glitters, impersonal, brilliant and lasting

Hypnotic. It is about as close to meditation as read can get

Fifty-five fictional cities, each described in beautiful detail - each with a woman's name... 
 
In Invisible Cities Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice. As Gore Vidal wrote 'Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.' 
 
This is a captivating meditation on culture, language, time, memory and the nature of human experience. 
 
'Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose... The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island' Jeanette Winterson 
 
'Touches inexhaustibly on the essence of the human urge to create cities, be in cities, speak of cities' Guardian 
 
'A subtle and beautiful meditation' Sunday Times

Collected Non-Fiction

The Written World and the Unwritten World

'An indispensable writer ... Calvino, possesses the power of seeing into the deepest recesses of human minds and then bringing their dreams to life' Salman Rushdie 
 
The difference between life and literature; the good intentions of holiday reading; the avante-garde; the fate of the novel; the fantastical; the art of translation: these are just some of the ideas in The Written World and the Unwritten World. A collection of essays, articles, interviews, correspondence, notes and other occasional pieces on writing, reading and interpreting books, this work gives us new insight into Italo Calvino's expansive, curious and generous mind. 
 
Translated by Ann Goldstein

Electric . . . this rich collection of essays, reviews, interviews and more . . . are not only the backstory to his fictional method, but often another expression of it

Engagingly whimsical . . . a wry sense of humour . . . there are gems to be mined. And, like real precious stones, they are found in unlikely places

Glimmering insight and wit . . . incisive . . . reading this book is time spent with a first-rate mind

Playful . . . unfailingly stimulating . . . there are plenty of delights

It is for these moments of pathos, irony and honesty, when palaces of dazzling reflection are swept aside and the most adventurous thinking is undone, that one reads Italo Calvino

Intelligent, witty, pleasingly erudite and razor-sharp

Wonderful . . . surveys his varied interests and discerning style . . . Calvino's prose is sparkling as ever, and he approaches ideas with wit and an open mind, always ready to challenge a stale point of view. This anthology will delight Calvino fans old and new

'If the world is increasingly senseless, all we can do is try to give it a style' 
 
The difference between life and literature; the good intentions of holiday reading; the avante-garde; the fate of the novel; the fantastical; the art of translation: these are just some of the ideas in The Written World and the Unwritten World. A collection of essays, articles, interviews, correspondence, notes and other occasional pieces on writing, reading and interpreting books, this work gives us new insight into Italo Calvino's expansive, curious and generous mind. 
 
Translated by Ann Goldstein

Cosmicomics

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. 
 
 Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. 
 
Twelve enchanting and fantastical stories about the evolution of the universe from the giant of Italian literature, Italo Calvino. His characters - whether human, dinosaur or mollusc - disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms - and have time for a love life. 
 
'A landmark in fiction, the work of a master' - Ursula K Le Guin

If you have never read Cosmicomics, you have before you the most joyful reading experience of your life

A landmark in fiction, the work of a master

This is classic Calvino, making you think and laugh at the same time

Twelve enchanting and fantastical stories about the evolution of the universe from the giant of Italian literature, Italo Calvino. His characters - whether human, dinosaur or mollusc - disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms - and have time for a love life.

The Baron in the Trees

A gorgeous new edition of a playful, romantic fable by one of the twentieth century's master storytellers.

One act of childhood defiance becomes a lifelong experiment in freedom. 
From the age of twelve, Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò makes his home among ash, elm, magnolia, plum and almond, living high in the trees. He walks along paths made from twisted olive branches, makes his bed in a holly oak, bathes in a fountain constructed from poplar bark and keeps an aerial library of the books with which he educates himself in philosophy and mathematics. Suspended among the leaves, Cosimo encounters bandits and pirates, conducts a passionate love affair and watches the Age of Enlightenment, the French Revolution and Napoleon pass beneath him. The Baron in the Trees is a classic literary fable about independence, imagination and political idealism. Playful, philosophical and wonderfully inventive, Italo Calvino’s novel turns one boy’s act of defiance into a lifelong experiment in freedom. 
'I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends' Salman Rushdie 'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists

The Narrative of Trajan's Column

'When the last fire goes out, time too will be finished' 
 
Italo Calvino was one of the most joyful and imaginative writers of the twentieth century. Here he muses on what the things we leave behind ­- whether waxworks or ancient graffiti, enigmatic maps or a crumbling Roman column - tell us about the greater truths of the world, space and time. 
 
One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

Taken from his Collection of Sand, these marvelous essays are not great ideas in themselves but commentaries on great ideas and the physical remains they have left behind them: astonishing objects and human-made places which have encapsulated different senses of wonder and desire. The essays range from fire-temples to world-changing maps, from automata to ancient cities. And, not least, the great enigma that has sat at the heart of Rome for some 1,900 years: Trajan's Column.

The Distance of the Moon

'Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.' 
 
Science and fiction interweave delightfully in these playful Cosmicomic short stories. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

'Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing ... like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void' 
 
With imagination and wit, Italo Calvino sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. His effervescent last works, left unfinished at his death, were the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which he was due to deliver at Harvard in 1985-86. These surviving drafts explore the literary concepts closest to his heart: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth), in serious yet playful essays that reveal his debt to the comic strip and the folktale. This collection, now in a fluent and supple new translation, is a brilliant précis of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. 
 
Translated by Geoffrey Brock 
 
'The book I give most to people is Six Memos for the Next Millennium' Ali Smith 
 
'Wonderful . . . full of wit and erudition' Daily Telegraph

Wonderful . . . full of wit and erudition

A brilliant, original approach to literature, a key to Calvino's own work and a thoroughly delightful and illuminating commentary on some of the world's greatest writing

I have always liked Calvino and after reading this book, I like him even more

Rich and deeply satisfying ... this is very much a book that sets you off thinking ... there is a universe in here

Calvino will continue to glitter, this strange, lonely prospector in the universe of words. . . a master in the empire of the imagination

Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before . . . he tells us, joyfully, wickedly, that there are things in the world worth loving as well as hating; and that such things exist in people, too. I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, while Britain burns, while the world ends.

No-one can read Angela Carter or David Mitchell without thinking of Calvino. Salman Rushdie is enthusiastic in his naming of Calvino as a major influence on his work, as am I.

Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. His major works include Cosmicomics (1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). He died in Siena in 1985, of a brain hemorrhage.

Letters 1941-1985

The extraordinary letters of Italo Calvino, one of the great writers of the twentieth century, translated into English for the first time by Martin McLaughlin, with an introduction by Michael Wood. 
 
Italo Calvino, novelist, literary critic and editor, was also a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal and Pier Paolo Pasolini. This collection of his extraordinary letters, the first in English, gives an illuminating insight into his work and life. They include correspondence with fellow authors, generous encouragement to young writers, responses to critics, thoughts on literary criticism and literature in general, as well as giving glimpses of Calvino's role in the antifascist Resistance, his disenchantment with Communism and his travels to America and Cuba. Together they reveal the searching intellect, clarity and passionate commitment of a great writer at work. 
 
'This literally marvelous collection of letters shows him to have been gregarious, puckish, funny, combative, and, above all, wonderful company, and opens a new and fascinating perspective on one of the master writers of the twentieth century. Michael Wood and Martin McLaughlin have done Calvino, and us, a great and loving service.' John Banville 
 
'A charming addition to the Planet Calvino - a place cluttered with sphinxes, chimeras, knights, spaceships and viscounts both cloven and whole' Guardian 
 
Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo, Italy. Best known for his experimental masterpieces, Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, he was also a brilliant exponent of allegorical fantasy in works such as The Complete Cosmicomics. He died in Siena in 1985.

Essays

Collection of Sand

Italo Calvino in Collection of Sand claimed that 'the brain begins in the eye'. The essays collected here display his fascination with the visual universe, in which the things we see tell a truth about the world. With encyclopedic knowledge and engaging curiosity, Calvino writes about such diverse subjects as the imaginative pleasures of maps, bizarre exhibitions and the earliest forms of written language. Books and paintings provoke discussions of artistic motivation, while descriptions of a meticulous Japanese garden, Trajan's column crumbling to dust or a Mexican temple smothered by the jungle lead to contemplations on space, time and civilization. 
 
Surprising and profound, Collection of Sand provides a glimpse into the mind of a master of the magination. 
 
Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. He died in Siena in 1985, of a brain hemorrhage. 
 
Martin L. McLaughlin is Professor of Italian and Fiat-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford where he is a Fellow of Magdalen College. He is the English translator of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino among many others.

A brilliant collection that may change the way you see the world around you

A pleasure . . . offers new glimpses into the mind of the great writer while also reminding us of Calvino's insatiable curiosity

A delight, these essays are distinguished by a sly philosophic humour and whimsy

Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. He died in Siena in 1985, of a brain hemorrhage. 
 
Martin L. McLaughlin is Professor of Italian and Fiat-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford where he is a Fellow of Magdalen College. He is the English translator of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino among many others.

Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvino's debt to the comic strip and the folktale. With his customary imagination and grace, he sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. This collection is a brilliant précis of the work of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. 
 
Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. His major works include Cosmicomics (1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). He died in Siena in1985, of a brain hemorrhage.

Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. His major works include Cosmicomics (1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). He died in Siena in1985, of a brain hemorrhage.

Into the War

Set in Italy in the summer of 1940, this trio of stories explores the relationships between the different generations caught up in the war as well as Calvino's own experiences as a teenager. In the title story, 'Into the War', we are given an insight into what life was really like for those too young to be conscripted into Mussolini's army, while in 'The Avanguardisti in Menton', Calvino and his friends take a revealingly anti-climactic trip to the garrisoned French town of Menton, the sole Italian conquest of the early months of the conflict. The final story, 'UNPA Nights', is a touching, comic tale of friendship in a blackout, where the narrator's imagination wanders as he roams through the seedier parts of the darkened town instead of guarding the school buildings. 
 
Into the War is Calvino at his autobiographical best, combining brilliantly recollected memory with compelling wit and perfect prose.

The Queen's Necklace

Writer, essayist and journalist, Italo Calvino was born in 1923 in Cuba, of Italian parents. He spent his early years in San Remo, and studied at Turin, where he worked as a publisher. His first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), described resistance against Fascism in a highly naturalistic manner. Calvino's whimsical and imaginative fables made him one of the most important Italian fiction writers in the 20th century. He died in Siena in 1985.

'The inspector ordered that the bird be searched.One of the agents stalled saying it made him feel sick, and after some fierce pecking another withdrew sucking a bleeding finger.' 
 
In these two stories from an inventive, comic master of the form, old friends and friendly rivals Pietro and Tommasso discover a treasure lost by the side of the road, and become suspected of a using a blameless chicken for devious ends. Italo Calvino's writing explores the fringes of these small, unusual scenes and finds incalculable wisdom and humour there. 
 
This book contains The Queen's Necklace and The Workshop Hen.

William Weaver

A magical, mystical novella about the art and power of storytelling, this is Italo Calvino's miniature masterpiece. 
 
A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then in a tavern. Having mysteriously lost their powers of speech, they must tell their tales using only a deck of tarot cards. As their stories interlink and overlap, a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of the human quest for meaning unfolds. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Italo Calvino

Books by Italo Calvino

Articles featuring Italo Calvino

Where to start reading Italo Calvino

Why read the classics?

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