Italo Calvino was born in Cuba on October 15, 1923, but raised in San Remo, Italy, a town close to France. His father was a professor of tropical agriculture at the University of Turin, and the young Calvino was encouraged to pursue the sciences but preferred literature. He was enrolled at the School of Agriculture at the University of Turin, when the German invasion of Italy during World War II interrupted his studies. At the age of twenty, after his parents were abducted by the Germans, Calvino joined an anti-fascist resistance organization called the Garibaldi Brigade. After the war, he returned to school to study literature, writing his thesis on the writer Joseph Conrad. He began writing in the forties as a journalist for L'Unita, a communist newspaper.

In 1947 he published the novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, which was translated and published in English as The...