Italian novelist's love letters turn political - The New York Times

MILAN— It started out as a soft summer feature, one of a series of light pieces about famous couples crafted to hook the reader's interest while filling newspaper space during a traditionally slow season. But the publication this month of nearly 50-year-old letters by the novelist Italo Calvino to his former lover, the actress Elsa de' Giorgi, has sparked an acrimonious cultural debate with a deeply rooted political subtext. "I want to write of our love, I want to love you writing, I want to have you while writing, nothing else," Calvino, the intellectual author known for such novels as "Mr. Palomar" and "Marcovaldo," wrote to the older married woman with whom he was involved between 1955 and 1958. "We are drugged: I can't live outside the magic circle of our love." And so on. Excerpts from a few of the 407 letters Calvino wrote to de' Giorgi, which now belong to a manuscript collection at the University of Pavia that has pledged not to publish them for another 15 years, were published

MILAN— It started out as a soft summer feature, one of a series of light pieces about famous couples crafted to hook the reader's interest while filling newspaper space during a traditionally slow season. But the publication this month of nearly 50-year-old letters by the novelist Italo Calvino to his former lover, the actress Elsa de' Giorgi, has sparked an acrimonious cultural debate with a deeply rooted political subtext. "I want to write of our love, I want to love you writing, I want to have you while writing, nothing else," Calvino, the intellectual author known for such novels as "Mr. P