Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino is a man who made each of life's "events" count, from his childhood to his death in 1985. Calvino was born "under the sign of Libra" in 1923, far from the European country where he would spend most of his life. His parents were traveling botanists, who stayed in Cuba two more years after Italo's birth. The family then moved to San Remo, Italy, a Riviera town where Italo passed his time exploring books and literature. Mario and Evelina Calvino wished for Italo to follow in their footsteps and study vegetation. They would get their wish later when son Floriano (born in 1927) became a geologist as an adult. Italo began his political involvement as a teenager when he was drafted into the Young Facists as part of World War II. Still during the war, he began studying at the University of Turin's agronomy department. Calvino joined the Garibaldi Brigades (part of the Italian Resistance) in 1943 and fought the Germans in the Ligurian mountains. He says that his time spent with the partisans taught him "the art of story-telling". The men would return from the day to tell their adventures over the nightly campfire. The next year, Calvino joined the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI).

When WWII came to an end, Italo went back to the University of Turin to finish school, this time studying literature. He got his degree in 1947, and his life as a writer took off. He began writing for Il Politecnico, L'Unita (a communist periodical), and working for Einaudi, a publishing house. It was within this first year that Calvino met several of the people who would influence his writing down the road, and "spent more time with the books of others than with [his] own". Elio Vittorini, director of Il Politecnico, and Cesare Pavese shared ideas with the young Calvino and introduced him to Leftist politics. Calvino could not know at the time what Vittorini would mean to him later on, both professionally and personally.

In 1947, Italo published his first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders). It is a story of a poor boy who joins the partisans, watches the world changing around him, and his realization of how little control he has in it. The book took him just twenty days to complete, and it sold six thousand copies. He had touched Italy with his first book. After a busy year at Einaudi, Calvino briefly left the publisher to devote his time to L'Unita.

His separation from Einaudi lasted only until January of 1950, when he came back on staff. Italo was put in charge of the literature volumes of Einaudi's newest project, La Piccola Biblioteca Scientifica-Letteraria. For this work, he compiled stories and folk tales from all over the country. He gained immensely from his work on the project, using much of the style and culture that he learned in his novels and stories to come.

Calvino completed another work on his own that year, Il giovanni del Po, but it was not published until much later. He took a month-long trip to the Soviet Union, and won the Premio Saint- Vincent for his journal entries during the trip. In the months to come, Calvino spun out several works which helped define his writing style (at the time): neo-realist. Between his books and his work published in newspapers and magazines, Italo touched much of Italy as his popularity spread. He wrote on his wartime experiences, his political views, fantasy stories, and collaborated on a collection of Italian Folktales. In 1957, Calvino made a major personal political change by leaving the Communist party, partially due to events in Hungary. His emotional separation announcement was published in L'Unita , stating "My decision to resign as a member of the party is founded on the fact that my discrepancies with those of the party have become an obstacle to whatever form of political participation I could undertake."

Calvino and Vittorini became coeditors of Il Menabo di letteratura in 1959. (They stayed with this project until 1967.) Italo spent six months in the United States on a grant from the Ford Foundation, passing most of his time in New York. He continued traveling (and writing) over the next several years, and met his future wife, an Argentinean translator, in Paris, France. Calvino's La Giornata di Uno Scratatore, written in 1963, marked the end of his neo-realist writing era. Italo journeyed to Cuba in 1964, where he married Esther Judith "Chichita" Singer. While in Cuba, he also had the opportunity to explore the country of his birth and meet with influencial people of the time. The newlyweds returned to Rome to live, where Calvino stayed active with Einaudi. The following year they had a daughter, Giovanna, and the famous Cosmicomiche was published.

In 1966, Calvino's friend and coworker, Elio Vittorini died. This loss deeply affected Calvino's personal and professional life. "The years immediately after his death coincided with a distancing on my part, with a change in rhythm... It's not that my interest in day-to-day living lessened, but I abandoned the impulse to be at the center first-hand." He moved to Paris, but would never really settle down there. Calvino continued to make connections with fellow writers, even translating a French work, Les fleurs bleus (The Blue Flowers). He had great respect for Raymond Queneau and his work, which had great influence on Calvino's future books.Italo Calvino had his works published almost yearly over the next decade and a half. He won several awards, including the Feltrinelli and the Staatpreis, and made appearances and presentations at universities and literary conferences all over Europe. He began writing for the Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading newspaper to this day. In 1980, the Calvino family moved back to Rome, where they made their home again. In the early 1980's, he entered the film world by not only winning a Nice Festival Prize, but being put on the jury for the Venice Film Festival. In 1985, Italo kept a rigorous schedule of appearances and presentations up until his death from a cerebral hemorrhage on 19 September.

More of his works were published in the years following his death. Over Italo Calvino's lifetime, he established himself as a respected writer, journalist, and thinkers of the twentieth century. As a man who grew up during a period of unrest in Europe and the world, politics influenced him from day one. By being involved, Calvino gave himself the chance to learn and understand the changing situations in the world, and made others want to listen. His novels do not read like political statements or dry chronologies, but stories which invite the reader to explore with him the lives of his characters. It is because of his talent and willingness to risk that his books make statements on politics and lifestyle that are respected today.
farmaci automedicazione