Discover Calvino starting from his passion for cinema

For those who went to school in the eighties, Calvino was above all a "summer read". A writer to take on vacation. We should have read "Marcovaldo" or "Le cosmicomiche" or the "heraldic trilogy" for pure pleasure, without the threat of homework or interrogation, partly because they were written especially for us, partly because Calvino (the teachers were certain) would capture us with the proverbial "Calvinian levity". Like an older brother, an imaginary friend, a playmate who reveals the joys of literature as cerebral amusement. In short, nothing to do with the heaviness of others. How could we be impatient with Calvino? He had written fairy tales, children's stories, science fiction, what more did we want from school? Not manualized, not canonized, Calvino, who died in the middle of the decade, was not only contemporary but close and "current", more similar to reading the newspaper in class than to Manzoni and Pirandello. And then there were the photos. Calvino was not immortalized in the severe family portraits or faded daguerreotypes of other writers, but in these current photographs in which he was always smiling, mocking, sardonic. But I was unable to grasp this topicality, much less his lightness. Calvino's science fiction, the metanovel, the combinatorial possibilities seemed to me very little compared to "Back to the Future" or "Blade Runner". Furthermore, I was suspicious and made uneasy by the "we learn by playing" method with which Calvino entered school, and on balance I preferred the clear and limpid coercion of the old classics to a feigned complicity.