#italo calvino

[garadinervi]

Ernest Hemingway, with Natalia Ginzburg, Italo Calvino, and Giulio Einaudi, to Elio Vittorini [October 1, 1948] [Archivio Elio Vittorini, Centro Apice, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milano]

[soupandcats]

Invisible cities drawing I gave up on

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

- Italo Calvino

[thunderstruck9]

Andrew Cranston (British, 1969), If on a winter's night a traveller, 2017. Oil on hardback book cover, 24.5 x 18 cm.

[alternativamenteuguali]

[la-pilli]

[infugacolbarone]

Certo la letteratura non sarebbe mai esistita se una parte degli esseri umani non fosse stata incline a una forte introversione, a una scontentezza per il mondo com'è, a un dimenticarsi delle ore e dei giorni fissando lo sguardo sull'immobilità delle parole mute.

- Italo Calvino

[dinonfissatoaffetto]

L'esperienza è la memoria più la ferita che ti ha lasciato, più il cambiamento che ha portato in te e che ti ha fatto diverso.

- Italo Calvino

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

[whisperthatruns]

The written word is alive too (you just have to prick it with a hatpin to see it start to bleed), but it enjoys its autonomy and physicality, it can become three-dimensional, polychrome, can rise up from the page hanging on to balloons, or drop on to it in parachutes. There are words that, in order to stay attached to the page, have to be sewn on to it, the thread passing through the loops in those letters that have spaces in them. And if you look at the writing with a lens, the thin sliver of ink turns out to be permeated with a thick flow of meaning: like a motorway, like a swarming crowd, like a river brimming with fish.

Italo Calvino on Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, tr. Martin McLaughlin, from “The Encyclopedia of a Visionary,” Collection of Sand (Mariner Books, 2013; orig. pub. in Italian, 1984)

[lunamarish]

Vuoto, separazione e attesa. Questo siamo.

Italo Calvino

[noosphe-re]

It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you concentrate and stare at the carpet, you recognize the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or magenta thread which, in a wide loop, brings you to the purple enclosure that is your real destination. Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet's immobile order with his own image of the city, an anguish of his own, and each can find, concealed among the arabesques, an answer, the story of his life, the twists of fate.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

[catastrofeanotherme]

Il barone rampante - Italo Calvino

[swingtoscano]

[hijadelviento]

«El infierno de los vivos no es algo que será; hay uno, es aquel que existe ya aquí, el infierno que habitamos todos los días, que formamos estando juntos. Dos maneras hay de no sufrirlo. La primera es fácil para muchos: aceptar el infierno y volverse parte de él hasta el punto de no verlo más. La segunda es peligrosa y exige atención y aprendizaje continuos: buscar y saber reconocer quién y qué, en medio del infierno, no es infierno, y hacerlo durar, y darle espacio».

Las ciudades invisibles (1972) Italo Calvino.

[contedimontecristo]

ig: _carnivorouslamb

my camera roll is full of pictures of books and coffee