Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 28. Chapters: Italo Calvino, Carlo Collodi, Primo Levi, Dino Buzzati, Italo Svevo, Giovannino Guareschi, Angela Bianchini, Alberto Moravia, Curzio Malaparte, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Cesare Pavese, Raffaele Palma, Michele Mari, Alessandro Baricco, Natalia Ginzburg, Edmondo De Amicis, Massimo Bontempelli, Filippo Anfuso, Ernesto Aloia, Simonetta Greggio, Tommaso Landolfi, Luigi Chiarelli, Gesualdo Bufalino, Gianluca Bedini, Giorgio Pressburger, Laurentius Abstemius. Excerpt: Italo Giovanni Calvino-Mameli (15 October 1923 - 19 September 1985) (Italian pronunciation: ) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winters night a traveler (1979). Lionised in Britain and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de Las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba in 1923. His father, Mario, was a tropical agronomist and botanist who also taught agriculture and floriculture. Born 47 years earlier in San Remo, Italy, Mario Calvino had emigrated to Mexico in 1909 where he took up an important position with the Ministry of Agriculture. In an autobiographical essay, Italo Calvino explained that his father "had been in his youth an anarchist, a follower of Kropotkin and then a Socialist Reformist." In 1917, Mario left for Cuba to conduct scientific experiments, after living through the Mexican Revolution. Calvinos mother, Eva Mameli, was a botanist and university professor. A native of Sassari in Sardinia and 11 years younger than her husband, she married while still a junior lecturer at Pavia University....