The vast forests and luxuriant fauna omnipresent in Calvino's early fiction such as The Baron in the Trees derives from this "legacy". On this small working farm set in the hills behind Sanremo, Mario pioneered in the cultivation of then exotic fruits such as avocado and grapefruit, eventually obtaining an entry in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani for his achievements. The family divided their time between the Villa Meridiana, an experimental floriculture station which also served as their home, and Mario's ancestral land at San Giovanni Battista. Calvino's brother Floriano, who became a distinguished geologist, was born in 1927. In 1925, less than two years after Calvino's birth, the family returned to Italy and settled permanently in Sanremo on the Ligurian coast. As an adolescent, he found it hard relating to poverty and the working-class, and was "ill at ease" with his parents' openness to the labourers who filed into his father's study on Saturdays to receive their weekly paycheck. Calvino described his parents as being "very different in personality from one another", suggesting perhaps deeper tensions behind a comfortable, albeit strict, middle-class upbringing devoid of conflict. Eva gave Calvino his unusual first name to remind him of his Italian heritage, although since he wound up growing up in Italy after all, Calvino thought his name sounded "belligerently nationalist". Born into a secular family, Eva was a pacifist educated in the "religion of civic duty and science". A native of Sassari in Sardinia and 11 years younger than her husband, she married while still a junior lecturer at Pavia University. In 1917, Mario left for Cuba to conduct scientific experiments, after living through the Mexican Revolution.Ĭalvino's mother, Giuliana Luigia Evelina "Eva" Mameli, was a botanist and university professor. In an autobiographical essay, Italo Calvino explained that his father "had been in his youth an anarchist, a follower of Kropotkin and then a Socialist Reformist". Born 47 years earlier in Sanremo, Italy, Mario Calvino had emigrated to Mexico in 1909 where he took up an important position with the Ministry of Agriculture. His father, Mario, was a tropical agronomist and botanist who also taught agriculture and floriculture.
Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba, in 1923.
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