Italo Calvinob. October 15, 1923, Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba - died. September 19, 1985, Siena, Italy), Italian journalist, short story writer and novelist, whose fanciful and imaginative fables made him one of the most important Italian fiction writers of the 20th century. Calvino left Cuba for Italy in his youth. . He joined the Italian Resistance during World War II and after the war settled in Turin, earning his degree in literature while working for the communist periodical L'Unità and the publishing house Einaudi. From 1959 to 1966, he edited, with Elio Vittorini, the left-wing magazine Il Menabò di letteratura. Two of Calvino's first works of fiction were inspired by his participation in the Italian Resistance: the neorealist novel Il pisteo dei nidi di ragno (1947; The Path to the Spiders' Nest), which considers the Resistance through the lived experience of 'a teenager as helpless in the face of events as the adults around him; and the collection of stories entitled Ultimo viene il corvo (1949; Adam, One Afternoon, and Other Stories). Calvino turned decisively to fantasy and allegory in the 1950s, producing the three fantastical tales that brought him international fame. The first of these fantasies, Il Visconte Dimezzato (1952; "Le Vicomte Fendu", in Le Chevalier Nonexistent et le Vicomte Fendu), is the allegorical story of a man divided in two – a good half and a bad half – by a cannon shot; he becomes whole thanks to his love for a peasant woman. The second and most popular fantasy, Il Barone Rampante (1957; The Baron in the Trees), is the fanciful story of a 19th-century nobleman who decides to climb trees one day and never sets foot again on earth. From the trees, however, he participates fully in the affairs of his peers. The tale humorously explores the interaction and tension between reality and imagination. The third fantasy, Il Cavaliere Inesistente (1959; "The Nonexistent Knight", in The Nonexistent Knight and the Split Viscount), is a simulated epic chivalric tale. Among Calvino's later fantasy works is The Cosmicomiche (1965; Cosmicomics), a stream-of-consciousness narrative that deals with the creation and evolution of the universe.