The answer is ITALO, five letters. Italo Calvino was the Italian writer behind Invisible Cities and If on a winter’s night a traveler, and his first name alternates vowels and consonants in a way that suits a crossword grid. If the clue gives you Italo and wants the surname, the answer is CALVINO, seven letters.
A first name chosen to point home
Calvino was born on October 15, 1923, in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba. His father, Mario, was a tropical agronomist and botanist, and his mother, Eva, was a botanist and university professor. Eva gave their son his unusual first name to remind him of his Italian heritage, so the name was a signpost from the start, pointing across an ocean to a country he had not yet seen.
He did not have to wait long to see it. In 1925, less than two years after he was born, the family returned to Italy and settled permanently in Sanremo, on the Ligurian coast. When he joined the partisans during the Second World War, the nom de guerre he used was Santiago, the first word of his birthplace’s name.
From partisan fiction to invisible cities
With the Garibaldi Brigades, Calvino spent twenty months fighting in the Maritime Alps until 1945. His first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, followed in 1947, a coming-of-age story in which an orphaned boy falls in with a band of partisans. The 1950s brought the three novels gathered as Our Ancestors, The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees and The Nonexistent Knight, along with his collection of Italian Folktales in 1956.
The later books grew stranger and more playful. Cosmicomics appeared in 1965. Invisible Cities, in 1972, is framed as a conversation between Marco Polo and the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, with Polo describing fifty-five imagined cities, each bearing a woman’s name. Midway through, Kublai asks about Venice, Polo’s hometown, and Polo replies that every time he describes a city he is saying something about Venice.
Italian novelist clues and the names they want
This clue has only one answer, but it belongs to a small family of name clues that swap the first name and the surname around, so check which half you were given.
| Letters | Answer | Clue shape |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | ECO | Italian novelist Umberto |
| 5 | ITALO | Author Calvino or Writer Calvino |
| 5 | ITALO | Novelist Svevo, or the Zeno’s Conscience author |
| 5 | ITALO | Invisible Cities author, first name |
| 7 | CALVINO | Author Italo, or Invisible Cities author, surname |
A novel about trying to read a novel
If on a winter’s night a traveler, published in 1979, is built as a puzzle about reading. The frame story follows a reader trying to read a book with that same title. The odd-numbered sections address you directly, in the second person, as you try to get hold of the next chapter, and the sections between them are the opening chapters of ten entirely different novels, each of which stops before it can go anywhere.
Calvino liked building fiction under rules. He was one of the notable members of the Oulipo, a loose gathering of mainly French-speaking writers and mathematicians, founded in 1960, who create works using constrained writing techniques. His Mr. Palomar, in 1983, arranges twenty-seven short chapters in a three by three by three pattern, each built around the title character’s philosophical observations of the world around him.
The other Italo in the grid
Calvino is not the only novelist who can hand you these five letters. Italo Svevo was the pen name of Aron Hector Schmitz, born in Trieste in 1861, when the city belonged to the Austrian Empire. The pseudonym means Italus the Swabian, joining an Italian name to a Germanic one. His best known novel, Zeno’s Conscience, came out in 1923.
Svevo’s career has a famous footnote. In 1907 he took English lessons in Trieste from James Joyce, who was teaching for Berlitz at the time and later championed Svevo’s work, helping it reach readers in France and eventually in Italy. A clue naming Svevo or Zeno therefore still wants ITALO, and only the surname in the clue tells you which Italo it means.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Italo Calvino?
An Italian writer, born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in Sanremo, who fought with the partisans in the Second World War and went on to write Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler. He was also a member of the Oulipo, the group devoted to constrained writing.
What if the clue is Author Italo?
Then the grid wants the surname, and CALVINO takes seven squares. Keep in mind that Italo Svevo, the novelist from Trieste who wrote Zeno's Conscience, shares the first name, so check the length and at least one crossing before writing CALVINO in.
Why was Calvino named Italo?
He was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, and his mother, Eva, gave him the unusual first name to remind him of his Italian heritage. The family returned to Italy in 1925, less than two years after his birth, and settled permanently in Sanremo.
