Biography
Italo Calvino was one of the most influential Italian writers of the 20th century. He was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, on October 15, 1923, to Italian parents. In 1925 his family returned to Italy and settled in San Remo. During the Second World War, Calvino joined the Italian Resistance in Liguria. After the war, he studied literature at the University of Turin, graduating in 1947, the year his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, was published. He joined the Italian Communist Party but left it in 1957, following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising. In 1959–60 he spent six months in the United States. He met the Argentine translator Esther Judith Singer in Paris in 1962; they married in 1964 and later settled in Rome. Among his best-known works are Difficult Loves, The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969), Invisible Cities (1972), and Palomar (1983). His essay collection Why Read the Classics was published posthumously. Calvino died in Siena on September 19, 1985.
