I was trying to write about cold weather. Since I was struggling, I set down my pen and opened this book and was amazed to read this:"Cold has a thousand shapes and a thousand ways of moving in the world: on the sea it gallops like a troop of horses, on the countryside it falls like a swarm of locusts, in the cities like a knife-blade it slashes the streets and penetrates the chinks of unheated houses."There! Simultaneously familiar and new. That is how it is done, Calvino. No wonder I read you

Here's a book I knew I would like the minute I held it in my hot little hands. For one thing, it's short - 120 pages, fairly large print. For another, it's symmetrical - 20 stories, 5 for each season of the year. And finally, having read one story from it in a seasonal collection already, I knew it was both magical and sarcastic, a combination as golden as snide and abstract are shit. (Ok, it could be argued magical and sarcastic and snide and abstract are po-tay-to and po-tah-to, but let's not

Beautifully written moments from the life of the comically-tragic character, Marcovaldo. A pretty, perfect book. Read it when you're sad. It will make you feel better.

Based on newspaper columns that Calvino would publish in Milan, these hilarious stories of the Marcovaldo character are charming and heart-warming!

maybe i'm no longer a good judge of calvino's books—maybe i've been too charmed, maybe i've suspended a certain critical distance in favor of the helpless warmth of marcovaldo, miskeen as he is—i don't know—what i do know is that in this marcovaldo, who is endlessly human, lies something of the lifeforce of the city. in marcovaldo's insistent sensitivity, his eye turned to the world of cats and moss while trapped in the closed and ever-closing quarters of a city busy with Consumption—in this mar...

What a wonderful simple booklet, without any pretentions but captivating. Twenty stories around the somewhat naive, romantic-dreamy Marcovaldo. He lives in an unspecified North Italian city and, above all, has an keen eye for nature. It looks like a children's book, with a strong tragi-comic accent, but there is also a solid social story in it, especially through the condition of poverty Marcovoldo and his family live in. Of course, the ecological theme makes it really modern.

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, transpla...

A nice book to start the Italo Calvino experience! Marcovaldo's set of stories is fun and delightful on every season. My faves are: Mushrooms In The City (spring), Park-bench Vacation (summer), The Lunchbox (autumn) Where The River Is More Blue (spring), The Wrong Stop (winter), and The Rain And The Leaves (spring).

I actually really liked this one, more than I expected. This is my second from Italo Calvino, and although this is a far difference from ".... If on a Winter's Night a Traveler", it was almost as great, in different ways. Nice to find an author than can write well in multiple genres/styles. "Morcovaldo" ["The Seasons in the City"] is a collection of vignettes, connected but separated by seasons and time. "Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irr...

A series of eccentric and unfortunate events...

dear italo calvino,i would like to be able to live in this time and place that you are writing from. i would like to be able to know what it was like to be living in a place that was still struggling to reconcile the modern with the rural. i would like to understand what it was like to live poorly in a place and time like that. maybe it would not be that different to live that way today. but moving to the heart of the matter, i want to know if marcovaldo is a sympathetic or comical character. i

Calvino has been on my radar for a long time, and I think I made a good choice in picking Marcovaldo for a first try. This is a small book, but it has a big heart. The stories are set in the poverty ridden early 1950's and follow up to the relative abundance of the 1960's. The immediate connections that spring to mind are the grand masters of Italian neo-realism: de Sica in "The Bycicle Thieves", Fellini in "Amarcord" and "Roma - Citta Apperta", Visconti in "Rocco and his Brothers" or "White Nig...

Italo Calvino is always fun to read. While Marcovaldo does not have the Borgesian or post-modern tropes of Invisible Cities or If on a winter's night a traveller, it is a heart-warming collection of brilliantly crafted stories, the pinnacle achievement being the lovable naivete and inventive imagination of the titular Italian, Marcovaldo. The whimsy and lyricism of Calvino's prose is worthwhile enough to embark on the too-short modern voyage of this short book, though it has much else to offer a...

Marcovaldo is a book that I read for the first time when I was 8 years old and then, at intervals of about 10 years, I have always gladly reread. I would say that it is therefore a book that has marked my career as a reader. At the age of 8, I saw things there, which although not the ones that hit me when I matured, remained impressed and I still feel them today. Calvino is a writer of the rare ones, of those who write profound and timeless stories, but with the style of fairy tales, so that his...

This was the first Calvino novel I read a few years ago and I remember enjoying it and finding it a nice light book. It has an air of magical realism about it and is almost like an urban fantasy, as the protagonist floats about his village, caught in a pleasant sort of reverie most of the time. Perfect for a quick, uplifting read as it's very short and a good introduction to this author.