Italo Calvino (Italian: 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).

Admired in Britain, Australia and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death.

Biography

Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba, in 1923. His father, Mario, was a tropical agronomist and botanist who also taught agriculture and floriculture. Born 47 years earlier in Sanremo, Italy, Mario Calvino had emigrated to Mexico in 1909 where he took up an important position with the Ministry of Agriculture. In an autobiographical essay, Italo Calvino explained that his father "had been in his youth an anarchist, a follower of Kropotkin and then a Socialist Reformist". In 1917, Mario left for Cuba to conduct scientific experiments, after living through the Mexican Revolution.

Calvino's mother, Eva Mameli, was a botanist and university professor. A native of Sassari in Sardinia and 11 years younger than her husband, she married while still a junior lecturer at Pavia University. Born into a secular family, Eva was a pacifist educated in the "religion of civic duty and science". Eva gave Calvino his unusual first name to remind him of his Italian heritage, although since he wound up growing up in Italy after all, Calvino thought his name sounded "belligerently nationalist". Calvino described his parents as being "very different in personality from one another", suggesting perhaps deeper tensions behind a comfortable, albeit strict, middle-class upbringing devoid of conflict. As an adolescent, he found it hard relating to poverty and the working-class, and was "ill at ease" with his parents' openness to the laborers who filed into his father's study on Saturdays to receive their weekly paycheck.

Selected filmography

• Boccaccio '70, 1962 (co-wrote screenplay of Renzo e Luciano segment directed by Mario Monicelli)
• L'Amore difficile, 1963 (wrote L'avventura di un soldato segment directed by Nino Manfredi)
• Tiko and the Shark, 1964 (co-wrote screenplay directed by Folco Quilici)

Film and television adaptations

• The Nonexistent Knight by Pino Zac, 1969 (Italian animated film based on 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 Adventure of a Bather in Difficult Loves )
• Fantaghirò by Lamberto Bava, 1991 (TV adaptation based on Fanta-Ghirò the Beautiful in Italian Folktales)
• Solidarity by Nancy Kiang, 2006 (10' American short)
• Conscience by Yu-Hsiu Camille Chen, 2009 (10' Australian short)
• "La Luna" by Enrico Casarosa, 2011 (American short)

Films on Calvino

• Damian Pettigrew, Lo specchio di Calvino (Inside Italo, 2012). Co-produced by Arte France, Italy's Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, and the National Film Board of Canada, the feature-length docufiction stars Neri Marcorè as the Italian writer and critic Pietro Citati. The film also uses in-depth conversations videotaped at Calvino's Rome penthouse a year before his death in 1985 and rare footage from RAI, INA (Institut national de l'audiovisuel), and BBC television archives. The 52-minute French version titled, Dans la peau d'Italo Calvino ("Being Italo Calvino"), was broadcast by Arte France on 19 December 2012 and Sky Arte (Italy) on 14 October 2013.

Legacy

The Scuola Italiana Italo Calvino, an Italian curriculum school in Moscow, Russia, is named after him. A crater on the planet Mercury, Calvino, and a main belt asteroid, 22370 Italocalvino, are also named after him.

Awards

• 1946 – L'Unità Prize (shared with Marcello Venturi) for the short story, Minefield (Campo di mine)
• 1947 – Riccione Prize for The Path to the Nest of Spiders
• 1952 – Saint-Vincent Prize
• 1957 – Viareggio Prize for The Baron in the Trees
• 1959 – Bagutta Prize
• 1960 – Salento Prize for Our Ancestors
• 1963 – International Charles Veillon Prize for The Watcher
• 1970 – Asti Prize
• 1972 – Feltrinelli Prize for Invisible Cities
• 1976 – Austrian State Prize for European Literature
• 1981 – Legion of Honour
• 1982 – World Fantasy Award – Life Achievement