It was an act of youthful presumption to telephone Italo Calvino without an introduction. To my amazement and delight the great modernist agreed to meet me in Rome.

Talking to Calvino in his flat near the Pantheon I was astonished by the mandarin diversity of his interests. Conversation ranged from his birth in Cuba to the Italian cinema, from his days as a partisan in the Resistance to French waste disposal units (all of which one can read