Today is October 15th one hundred years since the birth of the writer Italo Calvino, one of the most important Italian authors of the twentieth century and famous throughout the world. Today we celebrate it by talking about most iconic places in which he set some of his most famous novels and which are linked to his life.

Italo Calvino, the places to visit in his novels

Calvino is one of the most prolific and avant-garde writers in Italian literature: he wrote novels, short stories, essays, letters, fairy tales, he also worked on translations and also songs and musical works. He was a versatile author who drew on different genres: fantasy, realist, prose, poetry. He was a committed intellectual, storyteller, journalist.

He was born in Cuba to a family of Italian biologists. His parents, shortly after his birth, returned to Italy, in particular to Sanremo.

Da Sanremo, the young Calvino moved to Torino first studying at university and then working for the publishing house Einaudi. Over time, Italo Calvino left Italy to live in France and work in America.

A Calvino writer for whom the journey it becomes a fundamental component for his life and for his production because it is a source of inspiration, innovation and avant-garde, all words that are suitable to define his way of writing.

Many times, Calvino brings to life and even describes an interior landscape by resorting to indirect autobiography.

Italo Calvino was born on October 15, 1923
Italo Calvino was born on October 15, 1923

The novel set in Sanremo

Calvino sets his first novels in Liguria during Partisan Resistance. One of his masterpieces was born here: Spider nest paths, published in 1947, set in Sanremo, starring little Pin, orphaned by the war, who became an adult amidst horrors and crimes; the protagonist finds relief in the Ligurian countryside.

The novel gives a totally different image from the city we know today, linked to flowers, the Casino and the Italian song festival. Right here, after his birth and childhood in Cuba, the writer lived, fascinated by culture, cinema and the partisan struggle. Sanremo was the city of his father, Mario Calvino, who had lived in Cuba with his wife Eva, also a botanist and ornithologist, until Italo was born and, at that point the family returned to Italy, going to live in Villa Meridiana. From this context Calvino probably drew inspiration to write the most famous trilogy, that of the Ancestors.

Sanremo was a lively centre, frequented by international tourism. Calvino talks about the Pigna neighborhood, the historical one and which shows another side of the city, characterized by misery, poverty, desperation, violence, pain and sacrifice. This is the Sanremo that the writer wanted to tell and which remains imprinted in the pages of his first novel.

Calvino also longs for stories in Sanremo, fascinated by the city and the landscape.

Liguria is the place of the soul, of memories.

Sanremo and Turin are dear places where Calvino lived and set some of his works
Sanremo and Turin are dear places where Calvino lived and set some of his works; photo from wikipedia

The connection with Turin

Torino it is the city he chooses because it resembles him in character and because it manages to satisfy his needs: he arrives here when he enrolls in the Faculty of Letters and begins to work for Eunaudi.

The city of Turin is the backdrop to his other writings: in particular Marcovaldo and the stories he wrote in that period, set in the city.

International settings

Not only Italy, Calvino sets his works in much of the world configuring himself as a cosmopolitan Italian intellectual of international standing.

Born in the Cuban city of Santiago de Las Vegas. It sets one of his most famous novels, the Baron in the Trees, in an evocative place that recalls the Madeira Natural Park, in Portugal.

He then decides to live with his family Paris. At Harvard, Calvino wrote the American lessons, a series of conferences on the role of poetics. The cycle was never held due to Calvino's death in September 1985.

This short tour of the places linked to Calvino that we have proposed is intended to be a way not only to make tribute to this extraordinary writer but also to promote tourism through culture, a value that he supported personally.

cover photo from Wikipedia

Places linked to Italo Calvino, here they are last edit: 2023-10-15T21:54:54+02:00 da SABRINA PORTAL

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