by Italo Calvino · 1970
A collection of short stories grouped by period (Riviera Stories, Wartime Stories, Postwar Stories, and Stories of Love and Loneliness), moving between prewar Ligurian coastal boyhood scenes, wartime partisan skirmishes and Allied-occupation port life, and later solitary character studies — a soldier, a bather, a clerk, a reader, a poet — each caught in a single charged encounter or moment of near-connection, rendered through closely observed physical and sensory detail.