Portrait of Italo Calvino

Birthday profile

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino, Italian novelist, short story writer, and journalist (died 1985)

Born
October 15, 1923
Died
September 19, 1985
Zodiac sign
Libra
Birth year
1923

About Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an Italian novelist and short story writer. His best-known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). Eva gave Italo his unusual first name to remind him of his Italian heritage, although he would eventually grow up in Italy. Seated together "on a huge flat stone in the middle of a stream near our land", he and Scalfari founded a university movement called the MUL. His first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders) written with valuable editorial advice from Pavese, won the Premio Riccione on publication in 1947.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

The world when Italo Calvino was born

Italo Calvino was born in 1923. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1923

  • #1 song"Yes! We Have No Bananas"
  • Top movieThe Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille)
  • Best-selling bookBlack Oxen – Gertrude Atherton

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentFirst 24 Hours of Le Mans race
  • Top headlineTime magazine publishes its first issue
  • Technology milestoneFirst neon signs appear in the United States
  • Defining fadDance marathons
  • Notable inventionFrozen food process (Clarence Birdseye)
  • World population1.93 billion

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderWarren G. Harding / Calvin Coolidge
  • Sports championNew York Yankees (World Series)
  • U.S. population111.9M

1923 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Italo Calvino's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19232026
Gas$0.22$3.45/gal
Average home$5,700$435,000
Average income$3,380$67,500
Movie ticket$0.15$11.95
Postage stamp$0.02$0.73
Population111.9M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.