“When you're young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusk-pulp, damp and happy.”

Italian novelist and short story writer

Italo Calvino was an Italian novelist and short story writer. He is best known for the Our Ancestors trilogy, published between 1952 and 1959, and for later works such as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a winter's night a traveler. His fiction includes the three novels in Our Ancestors, the short story collection Cosmicomics, and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler. These works show the range of his imagination across fiction in different forms, from linked narratives to brief stories and more experimental novels.