Italo Calvino :: Essays Papers

Italo Calvino b. Oct. 15, 1923, Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba--d. Sept. 19, 1985, Siena,Italy), Italian journalist, short-story writer, and novelist, whose laughable and imaginative fables made him one of the most important Italian fictionalisation writers in the 20th century. Calvino left Cuba for Italy in his youth. He joined the Italian Resistance during World War II and after the war colonised in Turin, obtaining his degree in literature while working for the communist periodical LUnit and for the publishing house of Einaudi. From 1959 to 1966 he edited, with Elio Vittorini, the left-wing magazine Il Menab di letteratura. Two of Calvinos first fictional works were inspired by his community in the Italian Resistance the Neorealistic novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947 The Path to the come on of Spiders), which views the Resistance through the experiences of an adolescent as helpless in the middle of events as the adults around him and the collection of storie s entitled Ultimo viene il corvo (1949 Adam, one and only(a) Afternoon, and Other Stories). Calvino turned decisively to fantasy and allegory in the 1950s, producing the triplet fantastic tales that brought him international acclaim. The first of these fantasies, Il Visconte Dimezzato (1952 The Cloven Viscount, in The nonextant Knight & the Cloven Viscount), is an allegorical story of a man bristle in two--a good half and an evil half--by a cannon hired gun he becomes whole through his love for a peasant girl. The secondment and most highly praised fantasy, Il Barone Rampante (1957 The Baron in the Trees), is a singular tale of a 19th-century nobleman who one day decides to climb into the trees and who never sets foot on the ground again. From the trees he does, however, participate fully in the affairs of his fellow men below. The tale wittily explores the interaction and latent hostility between reality and imagination. The third fantasy, Il Cavaliere Inesistente (195 9 The nonextant Knight,in The Nonexistent Knight & the Cloven Viscount), is a mock epic chivalric tale. Among Calvinos later(prenominal) works of fantasy is Le Cosmicomiche (1965 Cosmicomics), a stream-of-consciousness narrative that treats the creation and ontogeny of the universe.