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Where to start reading Italo Calvino

Where to start reading Italo Calvino

by John Self and Lois Neville

2 October 2025

min read

The playful Italian polymath Italo Calvino had a hunger to learn about everything – spanning science, books, animals and war – which he passed on to the reader. His interests were as varied as his writing style, which covered novels, memoirs, essays and even fairytales. He loved to play games in his books, too, building stories within stories, constructing a novel from a Tarot pack, or winking to the reader about what it’s like to read an Italo Calvino book.

But with 24 titles to choose from, you can’t help but wonder: where to begin? Here’s our guide to scratching the surface of Calvino’s genius, so that you can see why Salman Rushdie once said, “I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, while Britain burns, while the world ends.”

What are Italo Calvino’s major themes?

Although Italo Calvino’s work spans a vast range of genres and formats, familiar themes emerge in his work, particularly when it comes to contrasts. Think imagination vs. reality, order vs. chaos. Alongside these, Calvino frequently reflects on modern life, alienation, nature, humour, ambiguity, and good old-fashioned storytelling itself. It’s all about playing with fantasy, philosophy, and science – so, you know, nothing too complex.

These themes tie into Italo Calvino’s beliefs around exploring the imagination and the need to break down rigid structures to fully embrace the world and its complexities – stuff that really gets the grey matter going.

Which Italo Calvino book should you read first?

Invisible Cities

We think it best to start with the most Calvino-ish of all Calvino’s books, Invisible Cities, to get a true sense of his style. It may feel a bit like jumping into the deep end, but with a writer like Calvino, this is undoubtedly the best approach.

Invisible Cities is a string of short descriptions of imagined cities, as told by the explorer Marco Polo. There’s Armilla, the city that is either unfinished or half-demolished (nobody is quite sure); Sophronia, where half the city is regularly folded up and put away like a travelling fairground; or Leonia, which throws out so much rubbish every day that “a fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds [it], dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.” It’s original, imaginative, philosophical, and, most importantly, fun. It’s this playfulness that makes it a great place to start.

At a glance: Considered Calvino’s masterpiece, Invisible Cities plays with the act of storytelling itself, creating a truly unique reading experience that, although it does require a good amount of concentration, is incredibly rewarding.

What order to read Italo Calvino for beginners

Invisible Cities is a great place to begin your Calvino reading journey. But what next? Here’s our suggestion of what order to read Calvino’s other works, specifically for those who are brand new to the author.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

Carrying on with Calvino’s best-known work, next up on our list is If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Calvino’s 1979 novel is justly famous: an intricate story composed of other stories, structured around the idea of reading this very book. It begins, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought…” The format of stories nested within one another, which unite in a surprising love story, inspired David Mitchell to write Cloud Atlas. Sorry, David, we love you, but the original is better than the cover version. And, yes, that weird title does eventually make sense.

At a glance: A fantastic example of metafiction, the experimental If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller may initially seem daunting, but it’s incredibly playful in tone. We reckon you’ll feel quite accomplished after reading it, too.

Last Comes the Raven

We think getting familiar with Calvino’s short stories is the next best choice after reading the previous two novels. Last Comes the Raven is a collection of early Calvino tales, gathering together the stories in Adam, One Afternoon and adding some never before published in the UK. It gives us, as the New York Times puts it, “the man behind the magician.” These are charming, moreish tales of rural life, where adults pass wisdom to children who don’t listen, teenage boys get bitten by ants to impress girls, and war is just over the horizon. The title story, in which a sharp-shooting boy chases a soldier, is both tense and touching.

At a glance: This collection of short stories shows Calvino at the start of his creative stride. With a focus on war, Last Comes the Raven juxtaposes the grim realities of conflict with its inherent absurdity, offering plenty of food for thought.

Mr Palomar

By this point, you’ll be evermore familiar with Calvino’s writing style, making Mr Palomar, the last novel Calvino published in his lifetime, a great choice to read next. Arguably, this book shows him at the height of his ingenuity. It describes 27 moments in the life of Mr Palomar, who overthinks everything: he passes a sunbathing woman so often to find the best way to avoid looking at her breasts, that she takes offence and covers up. This is a book about paying attention to everything, but only saying what is necessary. Mr Palomar, disgusted by people constantly spouting opinions, decides to speak only when he is sure of something, and as a result, “spends whole weeks, months in silence.” We could all learn from him.

At a glance: Thoughtful and reflective, Mr Palomar is the literary equivalent of sitting down with a philosopher and quietly listening to them tell stories.

Cosmicomics

It’s time to change things up a bit and get a little spacey with Cosmicomics. Calvino, always interested in science, turned his hand to science fiction in these stories. Narrated by a being with the unpronounceable name of Qfwfq, they cast fanciful fiction from scientific theories. In one story, the moon starts so close to Earth you can prop a ladder against it, but then lovers are parted when it moves further away. In another, set before the Big Bang, everything exists at one point, so living conditions for Qfwfq and his family are rather cramped. This is classic Calvino, making you think and laugh at the same time.

At a glance: This collection of short stories is an imaginative take on interrogating the universe’s many mysteries. Playing with both science and fantasy, Cosmicomics is playful, creative, and just a little bit existential.

The Road to San Giovanni

After exploring Calvino’s fiction, now is a fantastic point to delve into his personal essays, with The Road to San Giovanni. Here, Calvino dives into his memory and childhood with great warmth, exhibiting what the novelist Clive Sinclair called “the scientific precision of his imagination and his carnivalesque delight in irony and absurdity”. He writes about his teenage love of Hollywood films, about taking out the rubbish (Calvino’s only domestic talent, according to him), and about his relationship with his father, who wanted him to take over control of the family land. We should be glad, with dozens of brilliant books written as a result, that Calvino did not heed the call.

At a glance: Personal and reflective, The Road to San Giovanni sees Calvino looking back to his childhood, his influences, and how these have informed his role as a writer.

Which Italo Calvino books are best for experienced readers?

So, you’ve got a fair amount of Italo Calvino books under your belt now. It’s time to turn the notch up to hard mode. We recommend the following Calvino books for experienced readers already familiar with his work. As brilliant as they are, they sure give your brain a good workout. Think genre-bending, super-meta, wibbly-wobbly-wordy goodness, ending with a non-fiction recommendation that helps you put his entire body of work in perspective.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies

Moving back to fictional stories, The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a curious experiment in Calvino’s catalogue. To show that stories can be found anywhere, Calvino determined to write a book out of a set of Tarot cards, following the story as the turn of the cards dictated. The settings are a castle and a tavern, where people who have been struck mute tell their lives by displaying cards – the tale of the doomed bride, or of the alchemist who sold his soul – and so the book shows us how we each interpret the same signs differently. “I publish this book to be free of it,” wrote Calvino. “It has obsessed me for years.”

At a glance: Set in a mysterious castle, The Castle of Crossed Destinies delves into the storytelling process itself, interrogating symbolism, communication, and how we infer meaning from it all.

Our Ancestors

It’s time to get really weird with Our Ancestors, which we think is worth building up to. The novel and two novellas in this collection were written after Calvino gave up trying to write realistic fiction and instead “conjured up the sort of book I myself would like to read.” So we get The Cloven Viscount, who is bisected by a cannonball, and finds his two halves living separate lives; or The Baron in the Trees, where a stubborn 12-year-old boy climbs a tree and stays there for the rest of his life. Calvino’s fables, in the words of one critic, “patrol the limits of the unthinkable.”

At a glance: This collection of stories may be pretty absurdist, but Our Ancestors gets into the nitty-gritty of morality and the human condition. Expect philosophical reflection through a very strange lens.

Why Read the Classics?

Finishing up this list is Why Read the Classics?, another of Calvino’s non-fiction books that adds further richness to what you will have already read. There are almost as many essay collections by Calvino as works of fiction. Calvino knows a lot, but he prefers joking to showing off: classics, he says, “are those books about which you usually hear people say, ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading…’” This book gives a master’s guidance on everything from the ancient Greeks to Ernest Hemingway, proving that “a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” This timeless description also applies to Calvino’s own books.

At a glance: A boon to literature lovers, Why Read the Classics? is a testament to the enduring legacy of classic stories and why they continue to be relevant.

Frequently asked questions

What is Italo Calvino’s best work?

Like anything subjective, the best Italo Calvino book comes down to taste, mood, context, and what the reader is seeking at that specific time. In terms of which of his works are most popular, however, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and Invisible Cities are frequently near the top spot.

What is Italo Calvino’s writing style?

When it comes to Italo Calvino’s writing style, it’s best summed up as playful, imaginative, and experimental. Expect lyrical prose not far off poetry, but not so far that it’s inaccessible.

Is Invisible Cities hard to read?

Although we placed it right at the beginning of our list, Invisible Cities does have a bit of a reputation for being hard to read. This is more a result of its non-linear structure rather than the language and sentences used. Invisible Cities is something you want to concentrate on to fully appreciate its scope.

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