"One night's rain would be enough," he said to himself, "then they would be ready to pick." And he couldn't wait to share his discovery with his wife and his six children. On the job he was more absent-minded than usual he kept thinking that while he was there unloading cases and boxes, in the darkness of the earth the slow, silent mushrooms, known only to him, were ripening their porous flesh, were assimilating underground humors, breaking the crust of clods. Thus, one morning, as he was waiting for the tram that would take him to Sbav and Co., where he was employed as an unskilled laborer, he noticed something unusual near the stop, in the sterile, encrusted strip of earth beneath the avenue's line of trees at certain points, near the tree trunks, some bumps seemed to rise and, here and there, they had opened, allowing roundish subterranean bodies to peep out.īending to tie his shoes, he took a better look: they were mushrooms, real mushrooms, sprouting right in the heart of the city! To Marcovaldo the gray and wretched world surrounding him seemed suddenly generous with hidden riches something could still be expected of life, beyond the hourly wage of his stipulated salary, with inflation index, family grant, and cost-of-living allowance. Instead, he would never miss a leaf yellowing on a branch, a feather trapped by a roof-tile there was no horsefly on a horse's back, no worm-hole in a plank, or fig-peel squashed on the sidewalk that Marcovaldo didn't remark and ponder over, discovering the changes of season, the yearnings of his heart, and the woes of his existence. This Marcovaldo possessed an eye ill-suited to city life: billboards, traffic-lights, shop-windows, neon signs, posters, no matter how carefully devised to catch the attention, never arrested his gaze, which might have been running over the desert sands. Nobody noticed them except Marcovaldo, the worker who caught his tram just there every morning. One day, to the narrow strip of ground flanking a city avenue came a gust of spores from God knows where and some mushrooms germinated.
The wind, coming to the city from far away, brings it unusual gifts, noticed by only a few sensitive souls, such as hay-fever victims, who sneeze at the pollen from flowers of other lands. The last stories date from the mid-60s, when the illusions of an economic boom flourished.
#Marcovaldo italo calvino series#
The first in the series were written in the early 1950s and thus are set in a very poor Italy, the Italy of neo-realistic movies. These stories take place in an industrial city of northern Italy. Translation of: Marcovaldo, ovvero, Le stagioni in citta. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to: Permissions Department, Harcourt Brace & Company, 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Jules Feiffer, Passionella and Other Stories is out of print (9:05).George Takei, They Called Us Enemy (7:25).Ally Sloper: A Moral Lesson, cartoons by Marie Duval and words by Judy’s office boy is out of print (4:48).Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information. We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. (Episode duration: 44 minutes 39 seconds) We continue our travels off the beaten track with our usual round-up of reading recommendations, and a trip to Gilbert White’s House and Gardens in Hampshire, where we view the landscapes that sparked his evergreen classic The Natural History of Selborne.
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