ITALO CALVINO'S LIFE TRACK
Calvino's rich life experiences that largely influenced his thoughts and works, his work often maps real cities.
His ideology shifted with the intense intellectual movements of the time, especially in Paris, France at the time.
The important stages of his life are marked in red on this map.
The light blue color marks those experiences that greatly influenced the book, especially the 1950s Russia (USSR at the time) and US trips, click them to explore these inspired travels)
A trip to the Soviet Union in 1952 revealed to his fascinated eyes
- the colors of Moscow's Red Square,
-
Saint Basil's spectacular architecture,
-
Baku's mosques minarets in Azerbaijan
-
the magnificent vista of
Saint Petersburg's Palace Square
enthusiastically described in his notebooks.
But this USA trip changed his mind, which into contemporary urban and architectural shapes is captured in notebook entries
that detail his months of voracious cross-country travel.
- Le Corbusier's United Nations building,
"the great monument of our century"
- Frank Lloyd Wright's spirally building for the Guggenheim Museum
- the IBM factory in Poughkeepsie, "the labs, wonderful architecture, better than Olivetti, all with moveable
walls"
- Mies van der Rohe's famous town house in Detroit.
- modern feel of the Longshoremen's Union headquarters in San Francisco and the "wonderful new skyscraper
housing the headquarters of Zellerbach's paperworks"
Calvino devoured a vast array of architectural and urban forms
previously unknown to him. He was struck by the challenging diversity of North American urban
and architectural realities, which to his
eyes constituted a totally new physical space for human interaction.
