Opposed to fighting for a cause he didn’t believe in, Calvino fled and joined the widespread resistance that was at that time fighting against Italian and German fascists in the country. During World War II, Italy was a key member of the Axis powers, along with Germany and Japan these countries fought against the Allied powers of England, France, and eventually the United States. Calvino’s studies were interrupted, however, when he received orders to join the Italian army. A family tradition of devotion to science led him to enter the school of agriculture at the University of Turin, where his father was a distinguished professor of tropical agriculture. He attended public schools, and because his parents were nonreligious, he did not receive a religious education, nor was he subjected to the obligatory political indoctrination of fascist leader Benito Mussolini’s Italian government. They raised Calvino on their farm in San Remo, where he would spend the better part of the next twenty years. Shortly after his birth, his family returned to their native Italy. His father, Mario, a botanist, was fortyeight when Calvino was born his mother, formerly Eva Mameli, also a botanist, was thirty-seven.
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Works in Biographical and Historical Context More than two decades after his death, Italo Calvino’s writings remain both widely respected and crucially relevant to modern literature. All the while, his writing remained accessible to the general reading public. Calvino’s growth as a writer paralleled the major literary trends of the last forty years he moved from stories firmly grounded in reality to challenging story structures that simultaneously defied and redefined the traditional form of the novel. Perhaps best remembered today for such literary works as Invisible Cities and the ‘‘Our Ancestors’’ trilogy, which blended fantasy, fable, and comedy to illuminate modern life, Calvino also made important contributions to the fields of folklore and literary criticism.
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Italo Calvino was a noted journalist, essayist, and writer of fiction.
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Calvino, Italo, photo by Elisabetta Catalano.