LO SCOIATTOLO SULLA SENNA

A fascinating and unexpected portrait of Italo Calvino through the years he spent in Paris, his favourite places and his friends and family.

Between 1967 and 1980, Italo Calvino took refuge in Paris, a place of exile and literary creation. Through Calvino's words, the last great European cultural season, when Paris was the world capital of thought and art, comes back to light. His profound knowledge of French culture of those years (Paris was the capital of the "Nouvelle Vague", the intellectuals engagés, structuralism, and psychoanalysis), and especially his bonds with the Oulipo (a group including Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec) and Roland Barthes, marked a fundamental turning point in his work and vision of literature. Those years saw the birth of La città invisibile, Il castello dei destini incrociati, and Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, highly innovative novels that had been translated worldwide. Fabio Gambaro has lived in Paris for more than 30 years, where he works as a cultural journalist, curator of cultural events. He directed the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris for four years . Author of several essays, he sheds light on an essential but still little-known experience of the author of Il barone rampante, and evokes with a gripping voice the Parisian cultural world.