Il Barone Rampante – Italo Calvino

Easily my favourite book from Calvino’s Ancestors trilogy, and not just because a group of artists from my hometown decided to give Cosimo the burial he deserved, and placed a tombstone on a tree in the woods (they did the same for many other fictional characters whose burial places are not known – Anna Karenina, Obi Wan Kenobi, Roy Batty…).

The story is clearly implausible, but not completely absurd: after all every kid at some point wanted to just leave his/her family and go live on a tree (except that every kid would then decide to come back down within 15 minutes and not end up spending the rest of his/her life up there). The book is sweeter than the other ones of the trilogy, probably because Cosimo is actually a character to whom the reader can relate, unlike Medardo and Agilulfo.

Being confined by his desire to only live on trees without ever again touching the ground, Cosimo actually manages to win the hearts of Napoleon and the Tsar, of Rousseau and the people of his village, and, ultimately, also of the readers. 

Il Visconte Dimezzato – Italo Calvino

My second favourite novel from Calvino’s Ancestors trilogy. I read it as a 13 year old who struggled to find any stimulus in literature, strongly pushed by my dad, much like he had been at the same age (and with the same set of books) by his best friend.

I’ve always thought, and I still do, that I didn’t really read the book the way it was meant to be read. Not liking allegoric and metaphoric works, I just read the novel as a funny short story about a viscount whose body gets split by a cannon ball and whose two halves have very different personalities.

I wonder how I would feel about re-reading the book now, and I also wonder whether I should have read all of Calvino’s books (in particular the ones I didn’t particularly like) using the approach highlighted above, since it definitely seemed to work.  

Il Cavaliere Inesistente – Italo Calvino

Easily my least favourite book from Calvino’s Ancestors trilogy – probably because it’s, well, a bit too Calvinoesque. I have never been a fan of epic chivalric tales, even less of epic chivalric tales written in the 20^th century and with constant allegoric and fantastic elements.

The trilogy overall (which also includes Il Visconte Dimezzato and Il Barone Rampante) perfectly sums up my relation with Calvino: if he goes all medieval on the reader he loses me (the Visconte, possibly, being the exception), if the allegoric passages occupy essentially one entire book (like in this case) I’m not interested, if his fantastic tales are just too much to be even very faintly and remotely possible, I’m out. At the same time, if he softly touches upon immature love, or silly but understandable moral principles, I may get hooked.

And since Il Cavaliere Inesistente does the three things I dislike about Calvino, its love story is too forcefully epic and poetic, and Agilulfo’s moral stand is silly yes, but a bit dated (surprising in a medieval book, eh?) – well, I’m afraid this book is just not for me.