OHA 2019

The Roots of Italo Calvino

ART: 2019. The center drawing section was drawn in August 2014. In April 2019 I surrounded the
drawn portrait with pieces from a 1990-made linocut (of mine), ‘Tree with heart.’
MEDIA: Ink, pencil, watercolor, linocut pieces.
FRAMED: 27 in. H x 23 W [68 cm. H x 58.4 W]

BACKGROUND: Calvino, a noted writer, was born in Cuba in 1923 and died in Italy in 1985 at age 61. His parents were Italian. His father was an agronomist and botanist who had moved to Mexico, and later to Cuba. Before Italo’s second birthday the family moved back to Italy. In later life, while he worked as journalist, he is best known for his short stories and novels. My drawing title was inspired by his novel “The Baron In the Trees” (Italian: Il barone rampante), first published in 1957.

He wrote of his time as a partisan, fighting the German-Austrian Nazis during the Nazi occupation of northern Italy, in the book ‘The Path to the Nest of Spiders’ [Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno], first published in 1947. He was with the Garibaldi Brigades, a leftist anti-Fascist partisan group. In a short story collection ‘The Road to San Giovanni’ [La Strada di San Giovanni] he wrote of his service as a partisan in the chapter ‘Memories of a Battle.’ [The Road to…was originally published in Italian in 1990 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano].

He also wrote of his service as a partisan in ‘The Crow Comes Last’ (Italian: Ultimo viene il corvo), published by Einaudi in 1949.

Of historical note re: Calvino and Italian-Jewish writer Giorgio Bassani [see OHA 2009: Giorgio Bassani; 3 Scenes of Ferrara], in 1952 Bassani and Calvino both wrote for the Rome literary publication Botteghe Oscure.

An idealistic supporter of the Italian Communist Party (a phenomenon that had many supporters in western European countries with leftist parties during the post-war years) in his younger adult years, he eventually (in my view – thankfully) left the Italian Communist Party following the Soviet invasion and repression in Hungary of 1956.