Italo Calvino's The Seasons in the City

This paper will discuss Italo Calvino's book Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City. This book is a collection of twenty short stories, all of which depict events in the life of the title character, Marcovaldo. The stories are placed within the book in a seasonal order; in other words, the first story takes place in Spring, the second in Summer, and so on, consecutively. This gives the effect of the reader experiencing a span of several years duration in the life of Marcovaldo.

Marcovaldo is a poor workman living in an industrial city in northern Italy during the 1950's and '60's. Although he is a factory worker in an urban area, Marcovaldo "possessed an eye ill-suited to city life," and is always noticing the signs of nature in his environment, "discovering the changes of season, the yearnings of his heart, and the woes of his existence" (1). Although it is never stated whether or not Marcovaldo himself ever lived in the countryside, his fixation with nature in the midst of the city makes him a transitional figure who represents the results of urban migration on people who a few generations ago belonged to an agricultural peasant class. Where Marcovaldo himself is thrilled by nature, his children, who are thoroughly urban, seem to misunderstand any references to natural things. The stories about Marcovaldo and his family all have a humorous irony about them, which often concerns his attempts to merge his perceptions of nature into his urban life.

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atural and wholesome than what he usually gets. Inevitably, this desire gets him into trouble. In "The lunch-box," an Autumn story, Marcovaldo is unhappy to find that for the third day in a row his wife has packed him an unappetizing lunch of sausage and turnips. In the window of a nearby villa sits a little boy who has been sent to his room for refusing to eat his own lunch of fried brains. The two of them are delighted to trade lunches, but when the boy's governess arrives moments later, she mistakes Marcovaldo for a thief who is trying to steal the family silver along with the lunch. Sadly, Marcovaldo gives back the half-eaten plate of brains, and his lunch-box is thrown down to the pavement, where it is dented and ruined. In the Springtime story "Where is the river more blue?" Marcovaldo is so upset about the unhealthy quality of food available in the city that the grocery packages his wife Domitilla brings home "now filled him with fear, as if hostile presences had infiltrated the walls of his house" (67). He decides to go fishing in some place "'where the water is really water, and fish are really fish'" (68). Finally he locates what appears to be a "fisherman's paradise, perhaps still unknown to everyone but him" (6

Category: Literature - I