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First published in Italy as La Strada di San Giovanni by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano 1990
This translation first published by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1993
Published in Penguin Classics 2009
Copyright © The Estate of Italo Calvino, 2002
Translation copyright © Tim Parks, 1993
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-88960-3
Foreword by Esther Calvino
The Road to San Giovanni
A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography
Memories of a Battle
La Poubelle Agréée
From the Opaque
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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Italo Calvino, one of Italy’s foremost writers, was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo, Italy. When the Germans occupied northern Italy during the Second World War, he joined the partisans. The novel that resulted from this experience, published in English under the title The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, won wide acclaim. Best known for his experimental masterpieces Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Calvino was also a brilliant exponent of allegorical fantasy in such works as The Castle of Crossed Destinies, The Complete Cosmicomics, and the trilogy, Our Ancestors, comprising The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees and The Non-Existent Knight. An essayist, journalist and the author of many stories, Calvino won the prestigious Italian literary award, the Premio Feltrinelli, in 1973. Eighteen of his books have been published in English.
The New Statesman said, ‘Calvino cannot be defined within our existing terms … his is a voice which cries out the need to rehabilitate ourselves to our books, our lives, our world’ and Time called him ‘Quite possibly the best Italian novelist alive, one of those storytellers who hold a mirror up to nature and then write about the mirror.’
Italo Calvino died in September 1985, aged sixty-two.
One day in the spring of 1985, Calvino told me he was going to write twelve more books. ‘What am I saying?’ he added. ‘Maybe fifteen.’
Doubtless the first was to be Six Memos for the Next Millennium. As far as the second and third were concerned, I think he had only a vague idea himself. He would write lists upon lists, changing some titles, altering the chronology of others.
Of the works he was planning, one was to be made up of a series of ‘memory exercises’. I have brought together five of these here, written between 1962 and 1977. But I know he meant to write others: ‘Instructions for the Other Self’, ‘Cuba’, ‘The Objects’. Hence I felt I couldn’t use his working title, ‘Passaggi obbligati’, since it seems that many of the passages are missing.
ESTHER CALVINO