The Seasons in the City

The industrialization that pervaded Northern Italy after World War II created changes in the cities there as well as their inhabitants. Such changes and their impact are often the focus of Calvino's (1983) Marcovaldo: The Seasons in the City, the trials and tribulations of Marcovaldo, a factory worker among the lower classes. Marcovaldo's experiences are viewed with humor and poignancy by Calvino, from his flights of fancy while being forced to toil in a thankless position for the SBAV Co. to his struggles to provide for his family. Throughout his experiences, we see the impact of industrialization on cities and their inhabitants as well as a skewering of the impact of capitalism on people's lives, particularly the low-wage factory workers.

Marcovaldo performs his daily routine of working in the SBAV factor, much like many other low-wage workers in Northern Italy. However, Marcovaldo is pained by the changes wrought by the industrialization and burgeoning capitalism all about him. We are told early on that "Marcovaldo possessed and eye ill-suited to city life: billboards, traffic-lights, shop-windows, neon signs, posters" (Calvino 1983, 1). An unskilled laborer, Marcovaldo struggles to feed his family, toil at his menial job, and retains a passion for the pastoral life of nature that no longer characterizes the industrialized cities.

Marcovaldo adopts the struggles of his existence with a genial attitude, though sights, sounds, and smel

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work, he realizes everything is "the same as ever, as if the change that had cancelled the outside world has spared only his firm" (Calvino 1983, 17). Marcovaldo is made to shovel snow by the department foreman, showing the hierarchy of power that exists within industrialism and capitalism. As the foreman tells him, "Shoveling the snow off the sidewalk in front of the building is up to us. To you, that is" (Calvino 1983, 17). Despite shoveling snow being hard work, the nature provides Marcovaldo with some kind of escape from the drudgery of his factory position. We see that it is a position he feels imprisons him, for the snow represents "an element that erased the cage of walls which imprisoned his life" (Calvino 1983, 17). Even so, Marcovaldo knows he is better off than the unemployed who cannot find regular work, like Sigismondo. The two men share a half of a cigarette while shoveling snow, showing the lack of resources available to bother the menially employed and the unemployed. As he shovels, Marcovaldo has a thought that might be aptly applied to industrialism's impact on the cities of Northern Italy, "a city that could be unmade by shovel and remade in a different way" (Calvino 1983, 18). In contrast to Marcovald

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