One of several posthumously-published works of Calvino (who died in 1985), that were assembled from unfinished manuscripts, Road To San Giovanni collects various autobiographical pieces. There’s his account of his early love-affair with film, (A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography) with him sneaking off every afternoon in the provincial town of his youth to be immersed in flickering dreams; an episode from WWII fighting in Italy (Memories of a Battle) as well as his more contemporary struggle to take out the garbage from his Paris flat (La Poubelle agréée).


As this is work that the writer himself didn’t see as ready for publication the collection is uneven, there is the sense of ideas not quite digested, stories not quite yet fully written. In a way though this shows off Calvino’s abilities all the better; seeing his work as if stripped down to a rawer stage the ‘effortless’ lightness of his polished and completed stories can be seen as the fine, skillful artefacts that they are.


The main justification for this book though is the title story; a long and close description of his father’s life and way of being, recollected or reconstructed by a son over many years. On first reading it is merely delightful as Calvino conjures up an environment of market gardens and terraces amidst the fertile and welcoming nature of Liguria. On reflection though it becomes a marvellous statement about the maturing of the relation between parent and child; in particular the strange fact that we can never understand our parents at the time because their lives and experiences always run a full generation ahead of ours. The Road to San Giovanni has the middle-aged writer remembering and retrospectively admiring his agriculturist father and realising the similarities between them, one a cultivator of seeds, the other of words, affinities that apparent differences of taste hid during his youth.


Anyone who has wondered about the mysterious link between parent and child will find this a very rewarding piece.

‘The face of Jean Gabin was made of different stuff, physiologically and psychologically, from the faces of those American actors, faces that would never look up from a table bespattered with soup and humiliation as at the beginning of La Bandera....French cinema was as heavy with smells as American films were light with Palmolive, polish and antiseptic. The women had a carnal presence that established them in the film-goer’s mind as at once living women and erotic fantasies...while the eroticism of the Hollywood stars was sublimated, stylized, idealized.’ A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography p49