Marcovaldo is a collection of 20 short stories written by Italo Calvino. It was initially published, in 1963, as Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città. The first stories were written in the early 1950s.
Description
The book is made up of a collection of twenty stories, of which the first takes place in the spring, the second in summer, the third in the autumn and the fourth in the winter and so on, so that together they represent the yearly seasonal cycle five times. An Author's note explains that: "The first in the series were written in the early 1950s and thus are set in a very poor Italy. The last stories date from the mid-60s, when the illusion of an economic boom flourished". In September 1983, an English translation of the book by William Weaver was published by Secker & Warburg.
Plot summary
The Marcovaldo series depicts the life of a poor rural man with his family living in a big industrial city in northern Italy. The central character of Marcovaldo is an unskilled labourer for the company Sbav and Co. who has an affinity with nature and a distaste for city life. He is married to Domitilla and they have a growing family, which includes their daughters Isolina and Teresa, and their sons Michelino, Pietruccio, Filippetto and Fiordaligi. Other characters include Marcovaldo's foreman, Signor Viligelmo, the street-cleaner Amadigi, and the night watchman Tornaquinci. In each story Marcovaldo succumbs to something that appears natural and beautiful but actually disappoints him. Common themes in the stories include pollution, appearance vs. reality, failure, poverty and consumerism. The stories in the book are:
Critical reception
Writing in The New York Times in 1984, Franco Ferrucci noted of Calvino that: "Even early in his career, his rhetorical virtuosity disguised the subtlety and depth of his vision - especially in some of the stories in Marcovaldo, like The CityLost in the Snow, A Saturday of Sun, Sand and Sleep and The Wrong Stop. He writes lightly and jauntily; any trace of effort is concealed. But what catches the reader goes beyond the unspotted perfection of the style; it is his uninhibited poetic sense of life." Ferrucci added that, "What is so much admired by the readers of Mr. Calvino's later Invisible Cities was already at work inMarcovaldo and with a more cogent narrative drive. Invisible Cities seems like a memory, while Marcovaldo conveys the sensuous, tangible qualities of life".
TV adaptation
In 1970, Italian state TV company RAI broadcast a six-episode mini-series based on Marcovaldo with Nanni Loy in the title role and Didi Perego playing his wife, Domitilla.
