The Worlds of Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was, word for word, the most charming writer to put pen to paper in the twentieth century. He was born a hundred years ago in Cuba, the eldest son of a wandering Italian botanist and her agronomist husband. Shortly after his birth, the family returned to Italy, where they divided their time between his father’s floriculture station, in the seaside town of San Remo, and a country home sheltered by woods. When Calvino enrolled in the agriculture department at the University of Turin, in 1941, he seemed destined to spend his life grafting one marvellous thing onto another.