Marcovaldo: Or the Seasons in the City - City Lights Bookstore

. While the setting is gritty and realistic, Marcovaldo’s adventures often take on a surreal quality, reflecting Calvino's later interests in metafiction and the fantastic. Borges Center Why Read It?

While Calvino is widely celebrated for his postmodern meta-narratives ( If on a winter’s night a traveler ) and philosophical fables ( Invisible Cities ), Marcovaldo (originally published in Italian in 1963) often serves as the writer’s most accessible—and unexpectedly heartbreaking—entry point. It’s a cycle of 20 short stories, one for each season, following the misadventures of a clumsy, impoverished, nature-loving unskilled laborer in an unnamed, anonymous industrial city.