Italo Calvino
Marcovaldo ovvero le stagioni in città

The book that has kept me company for the last two days has been "Marcovaldo ovvero le stagioni in città" by Italo Calvino, a delightfully amusing yet profound collection of stories featuring, as the protagonist, Marcovaldo himself, a dreamy laborer always short on cash.

The structure of the book, brief and very smooth-flowing, indeed mirrors the four seasons: winter, spring, summer, and autumn. Each of the seasons is linked with five stories, all having Marcovaldo as the protagonist, dealing with the most varied adventures—and misadventures. Our hero is a simple worker, employed by the Sbav company and burdened with a large family consisting of his wife Domitilla and their six children, though only five are named in the stories: Isolina, Teresina, Pietruccio, Michelino, and Filippetto. The backdrop of these stories is a large industrial city, unnamed (most likely it is Turin, a city where Calvino lived for a long time).

The city-based novellas gradually outline the personality and—even to a small extent—the private life of Marcovaldo: he is a poor laborer, spending his whole day loading and unloading goods, perennially facing economic issues and leading a chaotic, oppressive, and ramshackle family life. Despite this, Marcovaldo also shows a certain sensitivity and intelligence, despite his proletarian background. Everything that relates to the natural world fascinates him immensely; as such, often, in his adventures, Marcovaldo gets lost in his dreams of escaping the bleakness of the city, to arrive at bucolic scenes implying a deep connection with nature established by the protagonist. Marcovaldo is a dreamer and perhaps a bit naive and submissive towards his superiors and authority in general, but he is not stupid at all, quite the opposite; one of the leitmotifs of Calvino's novellas is the notably clever schemes of the young worker, who finds ways to bring some delicious food to the table or, at least, to make his life less gloomy and gray. Despite this, all attempts to escape from the factory—the warehouse—and the economic burdens of life will end with a tragicomic finale.

The Marcovaldo family is the typical proletarian family of the 1960s, grappling with the Italian "economic miracle" and suddenly catapulted from rural reality into the industrial one, leading to the emergence of comic events, or rather, humorous ones that make the reader smile but also reflect on the condition of the average man within a new context—for the time—but modern in all aspects of daily life: low wages, job insecurity, economic hardships, consumerism, frenetic and syncopated life rhythms, the relationship with colleagues and employers, etc.

Calvino's work, therefore, represents an ironic yet fierce critique of the "industrial civilization," which, alongside its advantages of modernity and technological and economic progress, carries with it many other defects, perhaps less material and more spiritual, but ones that profoundly affect Man's relationship with the world and the surrounding nature. A critique expressed excellently, without rhetoric, with intelligence and depth of thought, employing those weapons that have always pained the "powerful" (human and/or material): irony and humor.