This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts this is.
In our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website.
If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it.
I hope you enjoy the program.
Hello.
Italo Colbino, 1923-1985 what?
An Italian author of inventive, bedazzling stories with a passionate belief that writing and art could make life better for everyone.
Works like Invisible Cities or if On a Winter's Night A Traveler and the science fiction of his cosmic comics have inspired writers and delighted readers in Italian and in translation around the world.
And as for why his stories are fantastical, fabulous fables at one step from reality, then perhaps his time with the partisans in World War II and the poverty of the following decade offers some explanation.
With me to discuss Italo Calvino are Beatrice Sica, Associate professor in Italian Studies at UCL Jennifer Burns, professor of Italian Studies at the University of Warwick, and Guido Bonsovera, professor of Italian Cultural History at the University of Oxford.
Let's start with you, Guido.
How and when did Calvino start out in life?
Well, he was born in 1923 and oddly, on the isle of Cuba.
But that's important because he only spends a year.
But it's important because it tells us something about his parents.
They were both scientists, both botanists, and indeed they were there because the father was directing a floricultural center there on the island.
But the following year they came back and his youth was very much in a way determined by the kind of scientific background of his parents.
I remember in his memoirs he wrote about the fact that he was almost he had to kind of hide away the fact that he had a literary interest because everybody was into science and the suggested reading was all about scientific knowledge.
And indeed, it took World War II eventually to kind of get him out of this because indeed, even when he went to university, when he was 17, 1940, he actually initially chose agricultural science, so following the family tradition.