Literary Excerpt: Calvino (C1)

If you are going to read one writer to calibrate your sense of modern Italian prose, read Italo Calvino. He is the writer Italians themselves point to when they want to show what their language can do — not because he is the most ornate or the most ambitious, but because his prose is the cleanest. Sentences land where they intend to land. Vocabulary is precise without being archaic. The syntax is rich enough to be unmistakably literary, but never knotted for the sake of knottiness. This page presents a short original passage written in the manner of Le città invisibili (1972) — Calvino's own text being in copyright until 2056 — and uses it to demonstrate the features of Calvino's style that learners can absorb and even imitate.

Background: Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was born in 1923 in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, to Italian parents — both botanists — and grew up in San Remo on the Ligurian coast. He fought as a partisan in the Italian Resistance during the Second World War, joined and later left the Italian Communist Party, and worked for decades as an editor at the Einaudi publishing house in Turin, where he shaped postwar Italian literary taste from inside the country's most important press.

His writing moved through several distinct phases. The early novels (Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947) are neorealist, rooted in the war. The middle phase produced his most beloved fantastical works — the trilogy I nostri antenati (Il visconte dimezzato, 1952; Il barone rampante, 1957; Il cavaliere inesistente, 1959) — and the cosmic fables of Le cosmicomiche (1965). The late phase is the most experimental: Le città invisibili (1972), Il castello dei destini incrociati (1973), and the metafictional Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979). Calvino died in Siena in 1985, leaving incomplete the lectures collected as Lezioni americane, his testament on the qualities he hoped twentieth-century literature would carry into the next millennium: leggerezza (lightness), rapidità (quickness), esattezza (exactness), visibilità (visibility), molteplicità (multiplicity), and the unwritten consistency.

Calvino is the most internationally translated Italian novelist of the twentieth century. He is read in classrooms from Tokyo to São Paulo. Within Italy, his prose is held up as a pedagogical model — the kind of Italian one wishes more journalists, academics, and bureaucrats would write.

The text: an original city in the manner of Le città invisibili

Le città invisibili is structured as a series of imagined dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The Venetian traveler describes to the emperor the cities he has visited in his vast realm — fifty-five cities in all, organized into eleven thematic categories (cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and signs, thin cities, trading cities, cities and eyes, cities and names, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, continuous cities, hidden cities). Each description is short, lapidary, and somewhere between travel report and prose poem: the opening city, Diomira, is dispatched in a single paragraph of about fifty words — a route, an arrival, and an inventory of marvels in silver, bronze, tin, crystal, and gold.

Here, then, is Onirea — a city Calvino never wrote, described to his exact specifications:

Scendendo dal valico e costeggiando il fiume per due giornate verso ponente, l'uomo giunge a Onirea, città con quaranta torri d'alabastro, meridiane dipinte su ogni muro, moli lastricati d'ardesia, un mercato dove si vendono soltanto campane, una gru cenerina che ogni sera si posa sulla torre più alta.

(Coming down from the pass and following the river for two days toward the setting sun, one arrives at Onirea, a city with forty alabaster towers, sundials painted on every wall, quays paved with slate, a market where only bells are sold, an ash-grey crane that alights every evening on the highest tower.)

This is one short paragraph, but every device that makes Calvino's prose what it is has been built into it deliberately. We will pull it apart phrase by phrase.

The opening gerunds: Scendendo dal valico e costeggiando il fiume

Calvino's city-descriptions characteristically open not with a finite verb but with parallel gerunds, and our passage does the same: scendendo (coming down) and costeggiando (skirting, following the edge of) — coordinated by e and modified by directional and durational complements. This is a classic literary opening gambit. The gerund places the reader in the act of motion before any subject is named, before any main verb arrives.

The Italian gerund here is doing the work that English does with a present participle (coming down, following). It expresses a co-occurring or causal-temporal action: the arrival at Onirea happens as a result of and during the descending-and-following. There is no need for a connective like quando (when) or dopo che (after); the gerund subordinates the action implicitly.

A second feature: scendendo and costeggiando are non-anchored to a specific subject. The grammatical subject of the main clause, l'uomo (the man / one), is the implicit subject of the gerunds too — but l'uomo is itself a generic. This is not a particular man on a particular journey; it is "one," an unnamed traveler, anyone. Literary Italian uses l'uomo (the human, as a general type) where English would use one or you — and Calvino leans on exactly this generic in his own city-descriptions. It is a register signal: encyclopedic, abstracting, almost philosophical.

For a fuller treatment of the gerund's role in literary syntax, see Pur Gerundio and Concessive Constructions and Compound Gerund.

The atemporal present: l'uomo giunge

The main verb of the sentence — giunge (arrives, reaches) — is in the present indicative, and this too comes straight from Calvino's playbook. Le città invisibili presents cities Marco Polo has already visited; one might expect the passato remoto (literary past) or even the passato prossimo. Instead, Calvino describes all fifty-five cities in the present.

This is the atemporal or encyclopedic present. It removes the action from any specific moment. The verb does not say that a particular traveler arrived at Onirea on a particular date; it says "one arrives at Onirea" — anyone, any time, by virtue of taking the described route. The city is described as if it stood permanently waiting, accessible to any traveler who follows the directions. The grammatical effect is mythic, atemporal, almost geometrical.

This is the same present that operates in encyclopedia entries, in geography textbooks, in proverbs, in mathematical proofs. Il triangolo equilatero ha tre lati uguali. (The equilateral triangle has three equal sides.) The proposition is true outside time. Calvino writes about his invented cities as if they had this same status. They are not events; they are facts about a possible world.

Paratactic style: the catalogue sentence

After the main clause comes the second great Calvino feature: a paratactic catalogue. The apposition città con... (a city with...) opens onto a list:

• quaranta torri d'alabastro (forty alabaster towers)
• meridiane dipinte su ogni muro (sundials painted on every wall)
• moli lastricati d'ardesia (quays paved with slate)
• un mercato dove si vendono soltanto campane (a market where only bells are sold)
• una gru cenerina che ogni sera si posa sulla torre più alta (an ash-grey crane that alights every evening on the highest tower)

These five items are simply juxtaposed, separated by commas. There is no e (and) before the final item, no rhetorical hierarchy, no explanatory connective. The list reads as if it had been compiled, item by item, from a traveler's notebook. Parataxis — the side-by-side placement of clauses or phrases without explicit subordination — is one of the defining stylistic choices of Calvino's later work. It produces a sense of inventory, of catalogue, of the world being recorded rather than narrated.

Notice, too, that the last two items each sprout a miniature clause: a dove relative with the impersonal-passive si (dove si vendono soltanto campane — "where only bells are sold") and a che relative (che ogni sera si posa...). Letting the final items of a catalogue carry a small clause — a last flicker of event inside the inventory — is another signature of Calvino's lists, which like to end on an item with a verb in it.

Compare with a hypothetical hypotactic version: La città ha quaranta torri d'alabastro, oltre alle meridiane che sono dipinte su ogni muro, mentre i moli sono lastricati d'ardesia e c'è anche un mercato in cui si vendono soltanto campane... — the same content, but encrusted with subordinators (oltre a, che, mentre, anche). The hypotactic version is heavier, more Manzonian, more nineteenth-century. Calvino's parataxis is faster, lighter, more modern.

Lexical precision

Look closely at the noun choices. None of them is unusual; all of them are exact — and each was chosen the way Calvino chooses his.

• torri (towers): the precise architectural term, not a vague edifici (buildings).
• ponente (west, the setting): a specifically literary word for "west" — the everyday word would be ovest. Ponente preserves the sense of the setting sun. Its mirror is levante (east, the rising): in the real Diomira chapter, Calvino sends his traveler "per tre giornate verso levante" — the compass of the sun, not of the map.
• alabastro (alabaster): a specific stone, contrasted implicitly with the ardesia (slate) of the quays and the implied bronze of the bells.
• lastricati (paved, especially with stone or metal slabs): a specific verb, not the generic coperti (covered).
• meridiane (sundials): the exact instrument, not a vague orologi (clocks).
• gru cenerina (common crane): zoologically specific, not uccello (bird).

Calvino's prose famously contains very few abstract nouns and very few vague verbs. Every noun names a precise object, every verb a precise action. This is what he meant by esattezza (exactness) in his Lezioni americane: a writer's responsibility to describe the world as if every word were a measurement.

The encyclopedic mode

Together, all of these features — the gerundive opening, the atemporal present, the paratactic list, the lexical precision — produce what we can call Calvino's encyclopedic mode, and they are why the Onirea paragraph, though invented, reads unmistakably like a page of Le città invisibili. The text reads like an entry in an imaginary encyclopedia of imaginary cities. It is descriptive rather than narrative. It catalogues attributes rather than reporting events. The reader is positioned as if browsing a reference work, not following a story.

This is unusual for fiction. Most novels narrate; Calvino, in Le città invisibili, describes. The narrative shell — Marco Polo telling Kublai Khan about his travels — is minimal. The substance of the book is the catalogue of cities. The grammatical choices match the project: atemporal present, paratactic lists, generic l'uomo, precise nouns.

Why this matters for learners

If you are at C1 and trying to push into Italian literature, Calvino is the right starting point. Three reasons:

First, his vocabulary is contemporary. Where Manzoni will throw at you fanciulla, talamo, codesto, quivi — words you must learn separately as literary register — Calvino uses words that mostly overlap with educated modern usage. The literary feel comes from syntax and tense choice, not from lexicon.

Second, his sentences are not exhibitionistically long. He uses hypotaxis when he needs it, but he does not chain seven subordinate clauses just to display the apparatus. A typical Calvino sentence runs twenty to forty words and resolves cleanly.

Third, his use of the passato remoto, the literary subjunctive, and the gerundive constructions is fully consistent with the standards of literary Italian, but never archaicizing. He shows you what these features sound like when used by a contemporary stylist for contemporary effect. After a hundred pages of Calvino, you will read newer literary fiction (Ferrante, Cognetti, Murgia) with new eyes.

Common Mistakes (in approaching Calvino)

A practical exercise: imitating Calvino

To absorb the style, try writing a short paragraph of your own in the same encyclopedic mode — exactly as the Onirea passage at the top of this page was written. Pick a real or imagined place. Open with two coordinated gerunds. Use the atemporal present. List five precise attributes in parataxis. Choose nouns that name particular things, not vague categories. Aim for fifty words.

A second sample imitation, for reference:

Risalendo il fiume e attraversando la pineta, il viaggiatore arriva a Maremoto, città con dodici ponti di legno, fontane d'ardesia, un campanile inclinato, mercati coperti che vendono solo spezie, un cane bianco che dorme sempre sulla soglia del municipio.

The form is the lesson. Once you can write a paragraph like this, you have internalized something specific and durable about Calvino's grammar.

Key takeaways

• Calvino is the modern Italian standard for clarity — the writer educated Italians point to as a model of good prose.
• His prose features: gerundive openings, the atemporal/encyclopedic present, paratactic lists, lexical precision, generic l'uomo, contemporary vocabulary with literary syntax.
• The atemporal present lifts description out of specific time. It is the present of encyclopedias, proverbs, and Calvino's invisible cities.
• Parataxis (juxtaposition without subordinators) produces the inventory effect, faster and lighter than nineteenth-century hypotaxis.
• Precision over flourish. Every noun names something specific; every verb does specific work.
• For learners at C1, start with Calvino. Le città invisibili and Marcovaldo are accessible; the literary syntax is fully present but the lexicon is contemporary.
• Imitate to absorb. Writing one paragraph in Calvino's mode teaches more than reading ten pages passively.