Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City

A poor city worker keeps seeking pockets of nature in modern urban life, with comic and sometimes disastrous results. Marcovaldo is poor, hopeful and unusually alert to the natural world. In the modern Italian city where he lives with his family, he searches for mushrooms, fresh air, moonlight, birds, fish, rest and small enchantments among streets, factories, neon and supermarkets. Each attempt turns comic, tender or disastrous. A cure becomes a problem, a picnic becomes a misadventure, a glimpse of beauty becomes another collision with modern life. Across twenty seasonal stories, Italo Calvino turns one working man's hunger for nature into a series of sharp, playful fables about poverty, urban living and imagination. Marcovaldo is a classic short story cycle for readers looking for translated Italian fiction, literary comedy, social satire and magical everyday strangeness. Funny, melancholy and ingenious, it shows Calvino at his most accessible and quietly subversive. 'Delightful and rewarding as always' Observer. 'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times