Marcovaldo

A charming portrait of one man’s dreams and schemes, by “the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century” ( The Guardian ).   In this enchanting book of linked stories, Italo Calvino charts the disastrous schemes of an Italian peasant, an unskilled worker in a drab northern industrial city in the 1950s and ’60s, struggling to reconcile his old country habits with his current urban life.   Marcovaldo has a practiced eye for spotting natural beauty and an unquenchable longing for th