![]() ![]() The future writer studied in San Remo and then enrolled in the agriculture department of the University of Turin, lasting there only until the first examinations. As Calvino grew up, he divided his time between the seaside town of San Remo, where his father directed an experimental floriculture station, and the family’s country house in the hills, where the senior Calvino pioneered the growing of grapefruit and avocados. Shortly after their son’s birth, the Calvinos returned to Italy and settled in Liguria, Professor Calvino’s native region. Calvino’s mother Eva, a native of Sardinia, was also a scientist, a botanist. His father Mario was an agronomist who had spent a number of years in tropical countries, mostly in Latin America. Italo Calvino was born on Octoin Santiago de Las Vegas, a suburb of Havana. What follows-these three selections and a transcript of Calvino’s thoughts before being interviewed-is a collage, an oblique portrait. Still later, The Paris Review purchased transcripts of a videotaped interview with Calvino (produced and directed by Damien Pettigrew and Gaspard Di Caro) and a memoir by Pietro Citati, the Italian critic. It was never completed, though Weaver later rewrote his introduction as a remembrance. Two years before, The Paris Review had commissioned a Writers at Work interview with Calvino to be conducted by William Weaver, his longtime English translator. He took fiction into new places where it had never been before, and back into the fabulous and ancient sources of narrative.” At that time Calvino was the preeminent Italian writer, the influence of his fantastic novels and stories reaching far beyond the Mediterranean. Upon hearing of Italo Calvino’s death in September of 1985, John Updike commented, “Calvino was a genial as well as brilliant writer. As Calvino says, “this is a many-faceted book, and there are conclusions throughout its length, on each of the faces and along each of the edges”.Interviewed by William Weaver & Damien Pettigrew Issue 124, Fall 1992 Or he can even open it randomly and read the love poem to the city he finds. He can follow the frame or the thematic rubrics. The author encourages the reader to become an adventurous traveler and explore the imaginary realm of Invisible Cities in any order he pleases. A work of fiction without a storyline, similar to a map of an endless land where exists hidden, intricate connections. It’s a novel without a precise order and a univocal meaning. Like The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), Invisible Cities is an example of combinatory literature. Yet the reading is not easy and carefully driven. There are also eleven thematic rubrics (five cities per each) that follow a mathematical pattern throughout the text. The novel consists of nine sections, with a perfect alternation of narrative frame and Polo’s accounts. An endless journeyĪt the beginning of Invisible Cities, the reader finds a well-organized index with an almost arithmetic structure. They are “a combination of many things: memory, desires, and signs of language.” And that’s what brings men to create, think and live in cities. Calvino’s cities – like all cities – are more than buildings and streets. Kublai Khan himself notices that “Marco Polo’s cities resembled one another as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements”. Some cities are similar, others seem real ( are they all a version of Venice? readers wonder) while others are dreamlike. And then there’s Laudomia, the city of the unborn, Argia, a city with earth instead of air, and Procopia, a city so crowded that the people hide the place and even the sky. While in Cecilia “the places have mingled”, Irene is “a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes”. Calvino’s cities are shapeless, contradictory, beguiling, discontinuous, ambiguous and fragmented within themselves. Though the places in Invisible Cities are imaginary, as a reader “ you will constantly find yourself picturing the streets of your own city or cities you have visited.” Fifty-five invisible citiesįifty-five invisible cities, all bearing women’s names. And Polo’s tales of cities, fifty-five in all. A narrative frame, written in italics and portraying the dialogues between the two protagonists. In Italo Calvino’s novel, the young Venetian traveler Marco Polo describes the cities he has seen in his travels to the melancholy emperor Kublai Khan. Published in 1972, Invisible Citiescollects poetic tales on the city in general. “What is the city today for us? I believe that I have written something like a last love poem addressed to the city, at a time when it’s becoming increasingly difficult to live there.” Italo Calvino, 1983 ![]()
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