Rare picture of Italo Calvino looking out of the window in Sanremo

Italo Calvino (15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer, admired all over the world, at the time of his death he was the most translated contemporary Italian writer. Between his best compositions emerge Our Ancestors trilogy, the Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities. In 1925 his family settled permanently in Sanremo on the Ligurian coast and they divided their time between Villa Meridiana, a mixture of floriculture station and an home. Forests and fauna were omnipresent in Calvino’s early fictions and this derives from the nature that surrounded the young boy. In fact Calvino in an interview stated that "San Remo continues to pop out in my books, in the most diverse pieces of writing." His secondary school was Liceo Gian Domenico Cassini, where he was exempted from religion classes for a parents’ request, but often he was called to justify his anti-conformism to teachers.

This experience made Calvino tolerant of other opinions and religion thoughts. In 1938 Eugenio Scalfari, the future founder of the weekly magazine L'Espresso and La Repubblica, came to Sanremo and he joined the same class of Italo and they shared the same desk. Furthermore in June 1940 Calvino was forced to participate in the Italian invasion of the French Riviera. In 1943 the university boy refused the military service and went into hiding, in 1944 he joined the Garibaldi Brigades, a clandestine communist group. The consequence of his refusal to be a conscript of the Repubblica di Salò’ s army was the hostage’ s period in which his parents found themselves from the terror of the Nazis. The novel "The path of the spider nests", the first novel written by Italo Calvino, published in 1947 by Einaudi, it is set in Sanremo and records the experiences lived by the writer during the Second World War and the Partisans' Resistance.

A picture of the journalist Eugenio Scalfari. On the right the first issue of La Repubblica, the journal founded by Scalfari in 1978.

In his words from an article by Eugenio Scalfari in La Repubblica of 17 May 2020 Scalfari considered the years at Liceo Cassini as fundamental: "The real fact that changed my life was the entrance to the Cassini high school, the studies I did there, the friends I met. There I spent the fairy season of adolescence and first youth. There my character and my way of conceiving myself and the world was formed. That was my first and true conquest: I saw myself grow up and I was gradually aware of that miraculous phenomenon that is thought in able to think itself."