Italo Calvino

He understood that much of the world we inhabit is made up of signs, and that signs may speak more eloquently than facts.

Calvino’s: “I have spent more time with other people’s books than with my own.” He added, “I do not regret it.”

‘The discovery of popular culture,’ writes Peter Burke,

took place in the main in what might be called the cultural periphery of Europe as a whole and of different countries within it. Italy, France and England had long had national literatures and a literary language. Their intellectuals were becoming cut off from folksongs and folktales in a way that Russians, say, or Swedes were not . . . It is not surprising to find that in Britain it was the Scots rather than the English who rediscovered popular culture, or that the folksong movement came late to France and was pioneered by a Breton, Villemarqué, whose collection, Barzaz Braiz, was published in 1839. Again, Villemarqué’s equivalent in Italy, Tommaseo, came from Dalmatia, and when Italian folklore was first studied seriously, in the later nineteenth century, the most important contributions were made in Sicily . . . In Germany too the initiative came from the periphery; Herder and Von Arnim were born east of the Elbe. (pp. 13–14)

Perhaps only this echo of material interest can counterbalance the instinctive gesture of contemporary man: that of throwing things away.

[1980]