Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City, by Italo Calvino, is a book that was recommended to me by my Argentine “sister” (my dear friend that I lived with as an exchange student to Argentina many years ago).  It’s one of her favorite books and so I put it on my list for The Classics Club. It’s a fun book to read, 20 short stories that are so very human. It is full of humor and pathos as one recognizes the character, Marcovaldo, as one of us…a bumbling, misguided, well-intentioned, basic human being. He was a country person living in the city, always out of his element and not quite understanding everything going on around him.

from the publisher:

Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams-but the results are never the ones he had expected.

Italo Calvino touches something deep inside us with these stories. With this thin volume and with just the right amount of words, he focuses a light on the human experience.

I read this book as one of my 50-books-in-5-years for The Classics Club. It was the book that was chosen from my list for The Classics Club SPIN #22!

I also chose this book to read for my personal challenge, “Wanderlust,” an effort to read books that are from or take place in each country of the world. This was a book that takes place in Italy.