Italo Calvino

A hundred years ago, on 15 September 1923, Italo Calvino, one of the greatest Italian writers of the 20th century, a partisan in the Italian resistance movement and a prominent intellectual in the period after the Second World War, was born in Cuba, in the province of Havana. His vast literary output encompasses several genres, from fairy tale collections to neo-realist and surrealist fiction, often questioning contemporary society and politics. His article about Carnival entitled “Il mondo alla rovescia” (“The upside-down world”) was published in the Pirelli Rivista magazine in 1970. His books include: Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders), Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium) Il visconte dimezzato (The Cloven Viscount), Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities) and Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller).