Italo Calvino

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Italian author of Invisible Cities, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Cosmicomics and other celebrated novels, fables and short stories of the 20th Century. Calvino (1923 -1985) had a passionate belief that writing and art could make life better for everyone. Despite his parents being scientists, who dearly wanted him to be a scientist too, and his time fighting with the Partisans in Liguria in WWII during which his parents were held hostage by the Nazis, Calvino turned away from realism in his writing. Ideally, he said, he would have liked to be alive in the Enlightenment. He moved towards the fantastical, drawing on his childhood reading while collecting a huge number of the fables of Italy and translating them from dialect into Italian to enrich the shared culture of his fellow citizens. His fresh perspective on the novel continues to inspire writers and delight readers in Italian and in translations around the world.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Professor Guido Bonsaver No other episodes
  Professor of Italian Cultural History at the University of Oxford
• Professor Jennifer Burns No other episodes
  Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Warwick
• Beatrice Sica No other episodes
  Associate Professor in Italian Studies at UCL

Reading list

• The Author in Criticism: Italo Calvino's Authorial Image in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom
  Elio Baldi (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2020) Google Books →
• Circulation, Translation and Reception Across Borders: Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities Around the World
  Elio Baldi and Cecilia Schwartz (Routledge, 2024) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel
  Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2003) Google Books →
• Infinite Artichoke
  James Butler (London Review of Books, 2023)
• The Path to the Spiders' Nests
  Italo Calvino (trans. Martin McLaughlin) (Penguin Classics, 2009) Google Books →
• The Baron in the Trees
  Italo Calvino (trans. Mikki Taylor) (Vintage Classics, 2021) Google Books →
• Marcovaldo
  Italo Calvino (Vintage Classics, 2023) Google Books →
• Difficult Loves and Other Stories
  Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver and Ann Goldstein) (Vintage Classics, 2018) Google Books →
• Invisible Cities
  Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver) (Vintage Classics, 1997) Google Books →
• The Uses of Literature
  Italo Calvino (trans. Patrick Creagh) (Houghton Mifflin, 1987) Google Books →
• Six Memos for the Next Millennium
  Italo Calvino (trans. Geoffrey Brock) (Penguin Classics, 2016) Google Books →
• The Road to San Giovanni
  Italo Calvino (trans. Tim Parks) (HMH Books, 2014) Google Books →
• The Written World and the Unwritten World: Essays
  Italo Calvino (trans. Ann Goldstein) (Mariner Books Classics, 2023) Google Books →
• Calvino's Fictions: Cogito and Cosmos
  Kathryn Hume (Clarendon Press, 1992) Google Books →
• Italo Calvino
  Martin McLaughlin (Edinburgh University Press, 1998) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m002552g

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002552g

Auto-category: 853.914 (Italian fiction - 20th century)