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    Marcovaldo: Or, The Seasons in the City
    Marcovaldo: Or, The Seasons in the City
    Marcovaldo: Or, The Seasons in the City
    Ebook143 pages2 hours

    Marcovaldo: Or, The Seasons in the City

    By Italo Calvino

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    A charming portrait of one man’s dreams and schemes, by “the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century” (The Guardian).
     
    In this enchanting book of linked stories, Italo Calvino charts the disastrous schemes of an Italian peasant, an unskilled worker in a drab northern industrial city in the 1950s and ’60s, struggling to reconcile his old country habits with his current urban life.
     
    Marcovaldo has a practiced eye for spotting natural beauty and an unquenchable longing for the unspoiled rural world of his imagination. Much to the continuing puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams and gives rein to his fantasies, whether it’s sleeping in the great outdoors on a park bench, following a stray cat, or trying to catch wasps. Unfortunately, the results are never quite what he anticipates.
     
    Spanning from the 1950s to the 1960s, the twenty stories in Marcovaldo are alternately comic and melancholy, farce and fantasy. Throughout, Calvino’s unassuming masterpiece “conveys the sensuous, tangible qualities of life” (The New York Times).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 26, 2012
    ISBN9780544133228
    Author

    Italo Calvino

    Italo Calvino nació en 1923 en Santiago de las Vegas (Cuba). A los dos años la familia regresó a Italia para instalarse en San Remo (Liguria). Publicó su primera novela animado por Cesare Pavese, quien le introdujo en la prestigiosa editorial Einaudi. Allí desempeñaría una importante labor como editor. De 1967 a 1980 vivió en París. Murió en 1985 en Siena, cerca de su casa de vacaciones, mientras escribía Seis propuestas para el próximo milenio. Con la lúcida mirada que le convirtió en uno de los escritores más destacados del siglo XX, Calvino indaga en el presente a través de sus propias experiencias en la Resistencia, en la posguerra o desde una observación incisiva del mundo contemporáneo; trata el pasado como una genealogía fabulada del hombre actual y convierte en espacios narrativos la literatura, la ciencia y la utopía.

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    • 3/5
      This is a rather intriguing work, but I fear much is lost in translation. Touches of mid-century Italian comedy are evident, but I daresay there is more than meets the eye. A better knowledge of mid-century Italy would be useful to better understand the subtle messages of urbanisation and the peasant mind. Calvino was rather prolific so with a little research and some more reading, I hope to glean the deeper purpose of this author.
    • 5/5
      I am a big Calvino fan, but of all his books Marcovaldo is the one I pick up on the days when the world does not seem to be a particularly nice place. The tribulations of this wonderful character, a dreamer of infinite gentleness and humanity, will warm even the crustiest of hearts.
    • 5/5
      In that the book revolves around one character, and contains both the humorous and profound in varying measures, it is like another book by Calvino, Mr Palomar, but with the difference being that the two characters have vastly different personalities. Marcovaldo, or Seasons in the City, is a sequence of 20 short stories based around the main character Marcovaldo. They are each set in a specific season, with each of the four seasons being represented five times. Marcovaldo, despite living in the city, identifies far more with the natural and seems to find urban life oppressive. He is quite a sensitive character, and his misadventures during the course of the book often revolve around either the kindness of his nature or his appreciation for the simple pleasures and beauties in life. Part of what makes the stories so enjoyable is that it is easy to identify with the thoughts of the character, and even when he does silly things and gets into trouble, his actions are brought about by good or innocent intentions. This is probably one of the better collections of Calvino's short stories, and would serve just as well to a first time Calvino reader as a more familiar one.
    • 4/5
      On the edge of the sidewalk at a certain point there was a considerable heap of snow. Marcovaldo was about to level it to the height of his little walls when he realized that it was an automobile: the de luxe car of Commendatore Alboino, chairman of the board, all covered with snow. Since the difference between an automobile and a pile of snow was so slight, Marcovaldo began creating the form of an automobile with his shovel. It came out well: you really couldn't tell which of the two was real. To put the final touches on his work Marcovaldo used some rubbish that had turned up in his shovel: a rusted tin served to model the shape of a headlight; an old tap gave the door its handle.A great bowing and scraping of doormen, attendants and flunkies, and the chairman Commendatore Alboino came out of the main entrance. Short-sighted and efficient, he strode straight out to his car, grasped the protruding tap, pulled it down, bowed his head, and stepped into the pile of snow up to his neck.Marcovaldo is a displaced peasant, living and working in the city but homesick for the countryside. As he walks the grim streets on his way to work, he keeps his eyes open for glimpses of the natural world he loves so much. These are amusing and stories with surreal touches, but they usually end sadly for Marcovaldo.
    • 5/5
      One of the most uplifting, beautiful, inspirational books I've found. The writing is splendid and makes event he most simple things in the world new and beautiful. This is the book I turn to when the snows of winter seem to be suffocating me or the summer sun is draining all my energy. It simply makes me appreciate life the way everyone should. PLEASE READ IT!!
    • 4/5
      Charming. As a city dweller myself, I found much to identify with in Marcovaldo's often fruitless quest to surround himself with natural beauty in a major metropolitan landscape. His unabashed, almost worshipful pursuit of any glimpse of green is a reminder to appreciate the little swatches of nature that I so often take for granted. Funny and comfortable, this small selection of stories is a delightful reminder to keep one's eyes open and one's heart full of love and adventure.
    • 4/5
      I think these whimsical vignettes about the poor but ever-hopeful Marcovaldo are best read, as I did, one at a time over a long period. Like occasionally meeting an old friend on the street and catching up. A nice bedside book.
    • 3/5
      Wat een heerlijk, complexloos boekje. Twintig verhaaltjes rond de wat na?eve, romantisch-dromerige Marcovaldo, die in een niet nader bepaalde Noorditaliaanse stad leeft en vooral oog heeft voor de natuur. Het lijkt wel een kinderboek, met een sterke tragi-komische inslag, maar er zit ook een stevig sociaal verhaal in, vooral door de armoede waarin Marcovaldo en zijn gezin leven. Uiteraard komt de ecologische inslag erg modern over.
    • 3/5
      Wat een heerlijk, complexloos boekje. Twintig verhaaltjes rond de wat naïeve, romantisch-dromerige Marcovaldo, die in een niet nader bepaalde Noorditaliaanse stad leeft en vooral oog heeft voor de natuur. Het lijkt wel een kinderboek, met een sterke tragi-komische inslag, maar er zit ook een stevig sociaal verhaal in, vooral door de armoede waarin Marcovaldo en zijn gezin leven. Uiteraard komt de ecologische inslag erg modern over.
    • 4/5
      Connected short stories that grew on me. The title character is basically a schlemiel, but it's not just about schlemielitude. Calvino surrealism is present. Marcovaldo is a poverty-stricken father of six in poverty-stricken northern Italy in the 1950s-1960s. First living in a basement room and then in a garret, he and his complaining wife and mischievous troublesome children make discoveries and get into pickles and end up on hospital cots or afoul of the law or the landlady. And life goes on to the next story.
    • 5/5
      Like Borges, Calvino's metier was the short form - short stories and novellas. Even his "novels" - 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller', 'The Castle of Crossed Destinies' 'Invisible Cities' - are short story collections underneath the skin. This is no exception. It falls into that category of collected tales relating incidents from the daily lives of their central character - 'Mr Palomar', 'Cosmicomics', arguably - that are at once mundane and fantastic.

      Marcovaldo is from peasant stock, transplanted to the industrial city - I'm guessing Turin - there to live in poverty with his young family in half-basements and garrets and to work in a packing factory. And herein lies the tension, as the country boy chases after those echoes of his former life to be found in the metropolis. There are no weak tales among the twenty collected here but I had favourites, inevitably. Like many of these tales, 'A Journey with the Cows' is a mini-picaresque with a powerful moral. 'The Wrong Stop' follows a similar path, featuring a heartbreaking and beautiful opening paragraph and a fantastical ending. They're tales of the unexpected in which the unexpected turns out to be not macabre but comic and surreal.

      Starting with 1952's 'The Cloven Count' and ending with 1983's 'Mr Palomar', I can't think of a more outstanding body of work in modern literature. The human insights, the humour, the sumptuous descriptions, the stylistic innovations and enormous imaginative power - Calvino's oeuvre is genuinely inspirational to both the adventurous reader and the writer.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Marcovaldo - Italo Calvino

    [Image]

    Contents

    Title Page

    Contents

    Copyright

    Author’s Note:

    SPRING

    SUMMER

    AUTUMN

    WINTER

    SPRING

    SUMMER

    AUTUMN

    WINTER

    SPRING

    SUMMER

    AUTUMN

    WINTER

    SPRING

    SUMMER

    AUTUMN

    WINTER

    SPRING

    SUMMER

    AUTUMN

    WINTER

    About the Author

    Copyright © 1963 by Giulio Einaudi Editore, S.p.A.

    English translation copyright © 1983 by Harcourt, Inc.

    and Martin Seeker & Warburg Limited

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

    For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

    www.hmhco.com

    The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

    Calvino, Italo.

    Marcovaldo, or The seasons in the city.

    Translation of: Marcovaldo, ovvero, Le stagioni in città.

    A Helen and Kurt Wolff book.

    I. Title.

    PQ4809A45M313 1983 853'.9'14 83-4372

    ISBN -13 978-0-15-157081-2 ISBN-10 0-15-157081-7

    ISBN -13 978-0-15-657204-0 (pb) ISBN -10 0-15-657204-4 (pb)

    eISBN 978-0-544-13322-8

    v3.1215

    Author’s Note:

    These stories take place in an industrial city of northern Italy. The first in the series were written in the early 1950s and thus are set in a very poor Italy, the Italy of neo-realistic movies. The last stories date from the mid-60s, when the illusions of an economic boom flourished.

    I.C.

    SPRING

    1. Mushrooms in the city

    The wind, coming to the city from far away, brings it unusual gifts, noticed by only a few sensitive souls, such as hay-fever victims, who sneeze at the pollen from flowers of other lands.

    One day, to the narrow strip of ground flanking a city avenue came a gust of spores from God knows where; and some mushrooms germinated. Nobody noticed them except Marcovaldo, the worker who caught his tram just there every morning.

    This Marcovaldo possessed an eye ill-suited to city life: billboards, traffic-lights, shop-windows, neon signs, posters, no matter how carefully devised to catch the attention, never arrested his gaze, which might have been running over the desert sands. Instead, he would never miss a leaf yellowing on a branch, a feather trapped by a roof-tile; there was no horsefly on a horse’s back, no worm-hole in a plank, or fig-peel squashed on the sidewalk that Marcovaldo didn’t remark and ponder over, discovering the changes of season, the yearnings of his heart, and the woes of his existence.

    Thus, one morning, as he was waiting for the tram that would take him to Sbav and Co., where he was employed as an unskilled laborer, he noticed something unusual near the stop, in the sterile, encrusted strip of earth beneath the avenue’s line of trees; at certain points, near the tree trunks, some bumps seemed to rise and, here and there, they had opened, allowing roundish subterranean bodies to peep out.

    Bending to tie his shoes, he took a better look: they were mushrooms, real mushrooms, sprouting right in the heart of the city! To Marcovaldo the gray and wretched world surrounding him seemed suddenly generous with hidden riches; something could still be expected of life, beyond the hourly wage of his stipulated salary, with inflation index, family grant, and cost-of-living allowance.

    On the job he was more absent-minded than usual; he kept thinking that while he was there unloading cases and boxes, in the darkness of the earth the slow, silent mushrooms, known only to him, were ripening their porous flesh, were assimilating underground humors, breaking the crust of clods. One night’s rain would be enough, he said to himself, then they would be ready to pick. And he couldn’t wait to share his discovery with his wife and his six children.

    I’m telling you! he announced during their scant supper. In a week’s time we’ll be eating mushrooms! A great fry! That’s a promise!

    And to the smaller children, who did not know what mushrooms were, he explained ecstatically the beauty of the numerous species, the delicacy of their flavor, the way they should be cooked; and so he also drew into the discussion his wife, Domitilla, who until then had appeared rather incredulous and abstracted.

    Where are these mushrooms? the children asked. Tell us where they grow!

    At this question Marcovaldo’s enthusiasm was curbed by a suspicious thought: Now if I tell them the place, they’ll go and hunt for them with the usual gang of kids, word will spread through the neighborhood, and the mushrooms will end up in somebody else’s pan! And so that discovery, which had promptly filled his heart with universal love, now made him wildly possessive, surrounded him with jealous and distrusting fear.

    I know where the mushrooms are, and I’m the only one who knows, he said to his children, and God help you if you breathe a word to anybody.

    The next morning, as he approached the tram stop, Marcovaldo was filled with apprehension. He bent to look at the ground and, to his relief, saw that the mushrooms had grown a little, but not much, and were still almost completely hidden by the earth.

    He was bent in this position when he realized there was someone behind him. He straightened up at once and tried to act indifferent. It was the street-cleaner, leaning on his broom and looking at him.

    This street-cleaner, whose jurisdiction included the place where the mushrooms grew, was a lanky youth with eyeglasses. His name was Amadigi, and Marcovaldo had long harbored a dislike of him, perhaps because of those eyeglasses that examined the pavement of the streets, seeking any trace of nature, to be eradicated by his broom.

    It was Saturday; and Marcovaldo spent his free half-day circling the bed of dirt with an absent air, keeping an eye on the street-cleaner in the distance and on the mushrooms, and calculating how much time they needed to ripen.

    That night it rained: like peasants who, after months of drought, wake up and leap with joy at the sound of the first drops, so Marcovaldo, alone in all the city, sat up in bed and called to his family: It’s raining! It’s raining! and breathed in the smell of moistened dust and fresh mold that came from outside.

    At dawn — it was Sunday — with the children and a borrowed basket, he ran immediately to the patch. There were the mushrooms, erect on their stems, their caps high over the still-soaked earth. Hurrah! — and they fell to gathering them.

    Papà! Look how many that man over there has found, Michelino said, and his father, raising his eyes, saw Amadigi standing beside them, also with a basket full of mushrooms under his arm.

    Ah, you’re gathering them, too? the street-cleaner said. Then they’re edible? I picked a few, but I wasn’t sure . . . Farther down the avenue some others have sprouted, even bigger ones . . . Well, now that I know, I’ll tell my relatives; they’re down there arguing whether it’s a good idea to pick them or not . . . And he walked off in a hurry.

    Marcovaldo was speechless: even bigger mushrooms, which he hadn’t noticed, an unhoped-for harvest, being taken from him like this, before his very eyes. For a moment he was almost frozen with anger, fury, then — as sometimes happens — the collapse of individual passion led to a generous impulse. At that hour, many people were waiting for the tram, umbrellas over their arms, because the weather was still damp and uncertain. Hey, you! Do you want to eat fried mushrooms tonight? Marcovaldo shouted to the crowd of people at the stop. Mushrooms are growing here by the street! Come along! There’s plenty for all! And he walked off after Amadigi, with a string of people behind him.

    They all found plenty of mushrooms, and lacking baskets, they used their open umbrellas. Somebody said: It would be nice to have a big feast, all of us together! But, instead, each took his own share and went home.

    They saw one another again soon, however; that very evening, in fact, in the same ward of the hospital, after the stomach-pump had saved them all from poisoning. It was not serious, because the number of mushrooms eaten by each person was quite small.

    Marcovaldo and Amadigi had adjacent beds; they glared at each other.

    SUMMER

    2. Park-bench vacation

    On his way to work each morning, Marcovaldo walked beneath the green foliage of a square with trees, a bit of public garden, isolated in the junction of four streets. He raised his eyes among the boughs of the horse-chestnuts, where they were at their thickest and allowed yellow rays only to glint in the shade transparent with sap; and he listened to the racket of the sparrows, tone-deaf, invisible on the branches. To him they seemed nightingales, and he said to himself: Oh, if I could wake just once at the twitter of birds and not at the sound of the alarm and the crying of little Paolino and the yelling of my wife, Domitilla! or else: Oh, if I could sleep here, alone, in the midst of this cool green shade and not in my cramped, hot room; here amid the silence, not amid the snoring and sleep-talking of my whole family and the racing of trams down below in the street; here in the natural darkness of the night, not in the artificial darkness of closed blinds, streaked by the glare of headlights; oh, if I could see leaves and sky on opening my eyes! With these thoughts every day Marcovaldo began his eight daily hours — plus overtime — as an unskilled laborer.

    In one corner of the square, under a dome of horse-chestnuts, there was a remote, half-hidden bench. And Marcovaldo had picked it as his own. On those summer nights, in the room where five of them slept, when he couldn’t get to sleep, he would dream of the bench as a vagabond dreams of a bed in a palace. One night, quietly, while his wife snored and the children kicked in their sleep, he got out of bed, dressed, tucked his pillow under his arm, left the house and went to the square.

    There it was cool, peaceful. He was already savoring the contact of those planks, whose wood — he knew — was soft and cozy, preferable in every respect to the flattened mattress of his bed; he would look for a moment at the stars, then close his eyes in a sleep that would compensate him for all the insults of the day.

    Cool and peace he found, but not the empty bench. A couple of lovers were sitting there, looking into each other’s eyes. Discreetly, Marcovaldo withdrew. It’s late, he thought, "they surely won’t spend the whole night outdoors! They’ll come to an

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