Italo Calvino: The Last Modernist

Abstract

Sitting in the garden at his summer home on the Tuscan Maremma, Italo Calvino was stricken by a stroke on 6 September 1985.Nearly two weeks later, now at the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that took his life.He was sixty-one years old.Speculation about his winning a Nobel prize had been rife for some time.Today, nearly three decades later, the question of his stature and status in postwar letters has become urgent once again, prompted in part by the recent publication of his letters, in English, in an edition selected and introduced by Michael Wood and translated by Martin McLaughlin.Calvino was born in 1923 in Santiago de las Vegas, a small town located outside Havana, Cuba.Both his parents were botanists, and his father was then conducting experiments with tropical fruits.In 1925, Orazio Raimondi, his father's closest friend and a Socialist member of Parliament, died and left his estate to create an experimental institute in floriculture that the two men had long planned together.Mario, Calvino's father, returned to San Remo (in northwest Italy) and became its director.Calvino grew up in the luxuriant gardens that surrounded the Villa Meridiana, spending his summers in nearby San Giovanni, a small town where his father's family also had property.San Remo was a small town inhabited by residents and well-to-do tourists.(Alfred Nobel built a villa there in 1891 and died there in 1896.)Calvino lived quietly until 1941, when he enrolled in the faculty of agriculture at the University of Turin.After two years, he transferred to the Royal University of Florence.But his life was now overtaken by outside events.On 25 July 1943, Mussolini was deposed by the Grand Council of Fascism and arrested on the orders of the king.Less than two months later, however, after being rescued by German troops, he declared the establishment of the Republic of Salò, nominally a new

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