One of Calvino’s gentlest books, yet also one of his most odd. 

Marcovaldo follows a poor labourer drifting through an industrial Italian city, continually trying to recover some fragment of wonder, nature or dignity from the machinery of modern life. Mushrooms growing beside bus stops become treasure. A billboard becomes landscape. A rabbit escape turns briefly mythic.

The stories are funny, melancholy and deceptively light. Calvino is a fabulist but underneath it sits a very real postwar anxiety about urbanisation, alienation and the way capitalism reorganises perception itself. Marcovaldo is constantly searching for beauty in places structurally designed to erase it.

Picador 1985 edition. First published in Italian in 1963. Good condition with light age toning and minor shelf wear.