Author

Italo Calvino

1923-1985 · Italian novelist and fabulist, author of Invisible Cities

Short biography: Italo Calvino in Great Lives

About Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, and grew up in Sanremo on the Italian Riviera. He fought with the partisans in the Ligurian mountains during the Second World War, an experience behind his first novel, The Path to the Spiders' Nests (1947). Working for many years as an editor at the publisher Einaudi in Turin, he compiled Italian Folktales (1956) and wrote the fantastic trilogy Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics (1965), Invisible Cities (1972) and Mr. Palomar (1983). Associated from 1973 with the French experimental group Oulipo, he died in Siena in 1985, leaving the lectures published as Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Notable works

Italian Folktales (1956)
Invisible Cities (1972)
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979)
Why Read the Classics? (1981)

On this site

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino

1979 · Postwar Contemporary · Novel

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a novel by Italo Calvino, published in Italian by Einaudi in 1979 and in William Weaver's English translation in 1981. It is a novel about reading novels, addressed to 'you', the Reader, who becomes its main character.

Language / Storytelling Art / Creation Identity Self

Why Read the Classics?

Italo Calvino

1981 · Postwar Contemporary · Essays

Why Read the Classics? is an essay by Italo Calvino, first published in Italian in 1981 and later chosen as the title piece of Perché leggere i classici (1991), a posthumous collection of his essays on books and authors.

Education Language / Storytelling Memory / Time