«Per avere rapporti genuini, costruttivi con gli altri è necessario diventare individui. Si diviene individui approfondendo la conoscenza di sè e mantenendosi fedeli alle proprie regole interne, al proprio codice personale di valori, al proprio stile. Bisogna lasciare che la propria singolarità emerga, anche a costo di apparire degli eccentrici. È questa la via per sfuggire al conformismo dilagante, alla massificazione, alla accettazione di modelli di comportamento predefiniti.»

[I. Calvino]

Design midterm! The quote is from invisible cities!

“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.”

— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

Italo Calvino, from If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino.

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

-- Italo Calvino

(Chania, Greece)

In writing, what speaks is what is repressed.

Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies; from 'I Also Try to Tell My Tale', tr. William Weaver

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

- Italo Calvino

Leggerezza,solo quella.

"Non ci sono altri giorni che questi nostri giorni. Che mi sia dato di non sprecarli, di non sprecare nulla di ciò che sono e di ciò che potrei essere."

Italo Calvino

Invisible cities drawing I gave up on

ITALO CALVINO If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

From mirror to mirror — this is what I happen to dream of — the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror.

Italo Calvino, from If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino, October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985.