Marcovaldo: or, The Seasons in the City     by Italo Calvino, Translated by William Weaver Original title: Marcovaldo Original language: Italian Published by Harcourt Pub. Date: 1983 Format: Paperback, 121 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.36 x 8.24 x 5.46 ISBN: 0156572044 List Price: $11.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $8.80 Published by Secker & Warburg Pub. Date: 1983 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 121 pages Not available for ordering Published by Picador, Pan Pub. Date: 1985 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 121 pages Not available for ordering Published by Minerva Pub. Date: 1993 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 121 pages List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering Published by Harcourt Brace:NY Pub. Date: 1983 Pub. Place: USA Format: Hardcover, 121 pages List Price: $9.95 Not available for ordering

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This is one of Calvino’s chronicles of a changing Italy. Marcovaldo is a Candide-like naïf observer of urban life. He has the heart of a countryman but, to make a living, has to live in an ugly and polluted Northern city. In a gentle, humorous way, Calvino points out how the cities created or expanded by the economic boom years are uncomfortable, grubby and short of open space.


It takes an extraordinarily light touch to be able to tell this story and make the reader smile at the same time. Amongst the best of the twenty little episodes that make up Marcovaldo are The Garden of Stubborn Cats, The Wasp Treatment and the adventures of The Poisonous Rabbit. Although one of Calvino’s most accessible books — in fact, a book a child might enjoy — it is neither a conventional short story collection, nor a novel, nor a novella. As in Invisible Cities, Calvino here takes a format from early medieval writing to use in his own (very) contemporary way.

‘It was a time when the simplest foods contained threats, traps, and frauds. Not a day went by without some newspaper telling of ghastly discoveries in the housewife’s shopping: cheese was made of plastic, butter from tallow candles; in fruit and vegetables the arsenic of insecticides was concentrated in percentages higher than the vitamin content; to fatten chickens they stuffed them with synthetic pills that could transform the man who ate a drumstick into a chicken himself. Fresh fish had been caught the previous year in Iceland and they put make-up on the eyes to make it seem yesterday’s catch. Mice had been found in several milk-bottles, whether dead or alive was not made clear. From the tins of oil it was no longer the golden juice of the olive that flowed, but the fat of old mules, cleverly distilled.’ p67