September 19, 1985

Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 to September 19, 1985) was an Italian writer, the child of parents who were both botanists. In his youth Calvino was a journalist for communist newspapers; his disillusion with that political ideology led him to a rejection of ideologies in general. This sensible fellow, was, in his enthusiasm for communism (before the invasion of Hungary in 1956) merely part of the almost universal intellectual prejudices of the first half of the 20th century. His fame as a writer, the author of the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979), led to a number of literary honors: In 1975 he was made Honorary Member of the American Academy, and in 1981 he was awarded the prestigious French Légion d'Honneur. There is a possibly complete bibliography of Calvino's literary writing at biographybase. It notes the posthumously published book of short stories: Under the Jaguar Sun (1988).

Calvino said. regarding cats and visible cities: The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

And, since the topic of invisible cities would seem to cover just about everything, we can include also a quote from Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), while feeling we have made a graceful segue: 

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language.

Did I mention that was written before 1988.