Marcovaldo or the Seasons in the City

An unskilled worker in a drab northern Italian industrial city of the 1950s and 1960s, Marcovaldo has a practiced eye for spotting natural beauty and an unquenchable longing to come a little closer to the unspoiled world of his imagining. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams, gives rein to his fantasies, tries — with more ingenuousness than skill — to lessen his burden and that of those around him. The results are never the anticipated ones.

"During the last quarter century Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nest, Calvino has not only found that special place, but learned how himself to make that special web of prose to which all things adhere." Gore Vidal

A charming portrait of one man's dreams and schemes, by "the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century" (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" (New York Times).

Translated from the Italian by William Weaver.

Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams-but the results are never the expected ones. Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Italo Calvino's superb storytelling gifts earned him international renown and a reputation as "one of the world's best fabulists" (John Gardner, New York Times Book Review). Born in Cuba in 1923, Calvino was raised in Italy, where he lived most of his life. He died in Sienna at the age of sixty-one.