Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino (1923-1985) was an Italian writer, born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, and raised in Sanremo on the Ligurian coast of Italy. He fought with the partisans during the Second World War, and his first novel drew on that experience. He later worked in publishing in Turin and wrote journalism and essays alongside his fiction.

Calvino moved from realist stories of the Resistance to fables, playful experiments and ingenious tales that mix imagination with science, cities, games and the act of reading itself. He also collected and retold Italian folktales. He lived for a time in Paris and later in Rome, and died in Siena in 1985. He matters because his clear, witty and inventive prose showed how fiction can be both light and deeply thoughtful, and he remains one of the most admired European writers of the twentieth century.