A major figure in 20th-century Italian literature, Italo Calvino is known for his imaginative, cerebral narratives and experimental prose, including works like Invisible Cities and If on a winter’s night a traveler. Though born in Cuba, Calvino lived much of his life in Italy and held a deep intellectual connection to its cities. His reflections on Turin, where he lived and worked for a time, reveal the city’s influence on his literary imagination.

“Here in Turin you can write because past and future have greater prominence than the present, the force of past history and the anticipation of the future give a concreteness and sense to the discrete, ordered images of today. Turin is a city which entices the reader towards vigour, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way toward madness.”

Italo Calvino