In the book: Why Read the Classics (trans. Martin McLaughlin, 1986, Penguin Books), Italo 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.'

I wrote the following essays, which are in part 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. (1996, 1996, 2008)

Cities into Sustainability: the space of sustainable living in the city (2012)

PS: I learnt about Italian writers in literature class with Simon Dickinson. It was the early '80s, and I had loved Shakespeare from early on, 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 beyond the Melbourne suburbs. In reading 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 seeking meaning where none is evident, I can't say?

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

Silvana Tuccio, November 2023

BOOKS from my bookshelf /Italo Calvino

Il castello dei destini incrociati

I racconti

Il cavaliere inesistente

Why Read the Classics

Perché leggere i classici

La nuvola di smog

Mr. Palomar

Sono nato in America

Books from the Italian children's literary tradition that I reviewed for the Vol. 1001 books you must read before you grow up