by Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was born into a family of Italian scientists in Santiago de las Vegas, near Havana, Cuba, on October 15, 1923. In 1925 the Calvino family returned to San Remo, Italy, located in the Liguria region, near Italy’s border with France. A lively, cosmopolitan city, San Remo sits on the Mediterranean Sea and remained Calvino’s home for most of his youth. World War II broke out when he was living there; Calvino was only 15 at the time. A few years later, in 1943, Calvino joined the Resistance movement against the remains of Mussolini’s Fascist government, which, with German backing, had founded the Republic of Salò in northern Italy. Calvino became a member of the “Brigata Garibaldi” (Garibaldi Brigade) operating in the Maritime Alps of Liguria, where his first novel, The Path to the...