"When I'm in an environment where I can delude myself that I'm invisible, I feel good."
A cultured, ironic and witty man, Italo Calvino was actually very reserved and solitary in his private life. An attitude compensated by his wife Chichita, brilliant, intelligent and polyglot. Endowed with an iron memory, attentive to detail, very serious, but capable of sudden bursts of joy as well as an incredible hardness. Those who knew Italo Calvino tell it like this and the multiplicity that has characterized all his literature immediately comes to mind.
Bernardo Valli, a great journalist and friend of Calvino, recalls in his book 'Italo' the chats with the writer at the Flore café in Paris. "I felt and was a miraculous amateur," he writes, referring to the speeches on Conrad, to whom Calvino had dedicated his thesis. Dacia Maraini speaks instead of his great irony and modesty, Michele Mari tells of the letter that Calvino wrote to him when he was just sixteen years old while the daughter of the great writer, Giovanna, remembers the first book she read, written by her father. And, with the same irony, he comments: "Luckily I liked it!".
100 of these Calvino, the special Ansa that, in recent months, has told how the great writer is still a source of inspiration in many fields - from cinema, to music, to science, to architecture - closes, on the day of the centenary, with the testimonies of those who knew him or came into contact with him. And with the words of the same writer who in a nice documentary of '74 by Nereo Rapetti, speaks of the pleasure of being invisible, or having the illusion.
"He was an ironic, witty man, very cultured but who never showed his erudition - recalls Dacia Maraini - a very nice company to know and attend, together with his wife Chichita". According to Valli it was she who brought him out of the tendency to isolate himself: "Chichita was sociable, Italo less", he writes, "but sometimes with people he little known, his wife's friends, he launched into a sudden joy". And he adds: "It seems that at the parties where Chichita dragged him he was also a discreet dancer".
Video 'Calvino was ironic, cultured and very funny'
Italo and Chichita had a lot of fun together, as their daughter told ANSA: "They had the same sense of humor", the same irony. Undoubtedly inherited from Giovanna Calvino who when asked about her father's first book that she read as a girl, replies: "It was the Baron Rampante, and I liked it! It's lucky that I also like him as a writer!" But what has struck her most in recent years is how Calvino is still present and continues to be a source of inspiration for many. "I am really moved - she said - by the love I still feel after all these years towards my father. It seems to me that his writing is timeless because evidently he continues to speak to people. Above all, I am grateful to his readers."
Video Giovanna Calvino tells the first book she read about her father
The great writer knew how to be very generous but also very tough. The critic Guido Davico Bonino remembers this well. In an interview he recounted his meeting Calvino who summoned him to Einaudi after reading one of his essays on the trilogy. And surprisingly he proposed to do the press office of the publishing house in his place. Davico Bonino accepts and begins a beautiful but also difficult adventure. "For a year - he said - he made me day by day as a coach and was a very hard pedagogue, one day I introduced myself to what would become my wife crying. She said to me: what happens? She had me redo a back cover 14 times, I replied." A memory that has remained indelible in the memory of the critic, now 85 years old, so much so that in the interview he also cites the title of the book: "It was the dam on the Pacific by Marguerite Duras".
Hardness and precision, but alternated with great outbursts of generosity. As happened with the writer Michele Mari who, just sixteen years old, received a letter of compliments for his comics on the halved Viscount. "I had shown the comic to my mother - she told ANSA - who was the author of children's books. His publisher came to our house, saw them and took possession of them, something I reproached my mother for." The publisher sent them to Einaudi to show them to Calvino, who appreciated them so much that he wrote to Mari. Not a letter of circumstance, but a very detailed page with comments on the texts and drawings. "I was stunned when I received it, but my biggest concern was to recover the original as soon as possible! Of course I was very pleased, it was a random and unexpected episode". Mari had already studied Calvino in middle school and still today has remained tied to the first novels. "His - he concludes - is great literature capable of going beyond the passage of time because Calvino is a great observer and analyst of the contemporary world".
Video When Calvino wrote to sixteen-year-old Michele Mari
The pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi also met Calvino when he was a boy. He lived in the same building as his father and passed by their house very often. In several interviews he said that Calvino often went to lunch at their house even if his father was not there. "I considered him an uncle," he said on several occasions, recounting that the writer gave him a succulent plant and meticulously explained how it could be reproduced by putting the leaves that came off in the earth. "He was one of the few in the group who worked with my father - he concluded - who showed a sincere interest in me".
All rights reserved © Copyright ANSA