In the book: Why Read the Classics, Italo Calvino, trans. Martin McLaughlin, 1986, Penguin Books, Calvino writes:

On the theme of 'forgetting the future', I wrote a few thoughts some years ago ...which ended: 'What Ulysses saves from the power of the lotus, from Circe's drugs, and from the Sirens' song, is not just the past or the future. Memory truly counts - for an individual, a society, a culture - only if it holds together the imprint of the past, and the plan for the future, if it allows one to do things without forgetting what one wanted to do, and to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.'

Writings inspired by the work of Italo Calvino:

Invisible conversations on the city 2016
Intimate city and its capacity to bring us 'home to ourselves' 2015
Writing from the margins: 3 essays on marginality, power, silence.

Cities into Sustainability: the space of sustainable living in the city

PS: I learnt about Italian writers in my final years of high school in literature class with Simon Dickinson. It was the early '80s, and I loved doing Shakespeare. However, when I was introduced to the European existentialists like Albert Camus, to poets like Emily Dickinson, to the texts of songs such as "Sugar Man" by Rodriguez, to films like Roman Polanski's Macbeth and to Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar, I started to perceive the horizon. In reading Italo Calvino, the trajectory of my identity was interrupted, and I was no longer a 1980s Australian teenager who happened to be Italian born. Instead, I had begun to grasp the legacy of the Italian intellectuals. Did I inherit some of Calvino's postmodernism, that of making meaning where none is evident?

PPS Simon was not only by far taller than the FIAT500, aka BAMBINO, that he drove around Melbourne, he proved it possible. :-)

Silvana Tuccio, November 2023