Italo Calvino was born in Cuba on October 15, 1923, at the botanical station of Santiago de Las Vegas, which his parents, both botanists, had built to carry out their research. Shortly after his birth, the family returned to Sanremo, the hometown of his father, Mario. Like his parents, the young Calvino was anti-fascist, and when the partisan war began in the Ligurian hills, he immediately joined it alongside his brother Floriano. His battle name was Santiago, in homage to the place where he was born in Cuba. The writer would later draw inspiration from his partisan experience for his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, published by Einaudi in 1947, which focuses on a child caught up in the Resistance.
Meanwhile, Calvino also became an editor for the same publishing house in Turin. During the 1950s, he published three novels that he later compiled into the Our Ancestors trilogy in 1960: The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, and The Nonexistent Knight, all published by Einaudi. His works often contain criticism of the disorientation and alienation of urban life, as seen in Marcovaldo, while his exploration of the fantastic and visionary, often allegorical of contemporary life, deepened in books such as Invisible Cities, Cosmicomics, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
In 1956, he experienced a profound break with the political and cultural world, leaving the Italian Communist Party (PCI) following the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He then moved to Paris but decided to return to Italy in the early 1970s.
Specifically, he settled in a villa in Roccamare, near Castiglione della Pescaia, invited by his friend Pietro Citati. This place became his “buen retiro.” There, he wrote many of the texts in Palomar and all of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium. He fell in love with this corner of Tuscany so much that he set some of his alter ego Palomar’s reflections there and spent his final evenings in this retreat while working on the Six Memos he was supposed to deliver at Harvard in the summer of 1985. Calvino passed away on September 19, 1985, and is buried alongside his wife, Esther Judith Singer, in the garden-cemetery of Castiglione della Pescaia. His resting place is at the top of the town, nestled like Montale’s agave on the rock, overlooking the entire coast up to the Piombino promontory.
On this sandy beach, with the imposing pine forest behind him, Calvino, identifying with Palomar, spent days trying to understand the world, starting from the observation of a wave: “The sea is barely rippled, and small waves lap against the sandy shore.Mr. Palomar stands on the shore and watches a wave. Not that he is absorbed in the contemplation of waves. He is not absorbed, because he knows exactly what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave, and he looks at it. He is not contemplating, because contemplation requires the right temperament, the right state of mind, and the right external circumstances: and although Mr. Palomar has nothing against contemplation in principle, none of these three conditions apply to him. Finally, it is not ‘the waves’ he intends to watch, but a single wave and nothing else: wanting to avoid vague sensations, he sets for each of his actions a limited and precise object. Mr. Palomar sees a wave emerge in the distance, grow, approach, change shape and color, curl over itself, break, vanish, and flow back.”
Citati recalled that the place Calvino had chosen “was a strip of sand enclosed between two promontories, a pine forest, a thicket, a small garden, where everything seemed miniaturized. He wrote in the heart of the house, high up, in a tiny study reached by a perilous staircase, like an aerial chicken coop or a dovecote. Below him, his wife chatted with friends or the housekeeper, suppliers came in, friends arrived; and he kept writing… He never said no to things. But by then, he had deeply withdrawn from reality, enclosed in his world of light shadows.”