After a childhood quarrel with his father, young Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò climbs into the trees of his family's Ligurian estate and vows never to set foot on the ground again, living out the rest of his life aloft while hunting, reading Enlightenment texts, corresponding with Diderot, falling for a girl named Viola, and getting drawn into the political upheavals of his era from among the branches.
Books mentioned in The Baron in the Trees (4)
Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage: “there he was reading Lesage's Gil Blas, holding his book in one hand and his gun in the other.”
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson: “I was just reading Clarissa.”
La Pucelle by Voltaire: “one or two of them secretly asked Father Sulpicio to get Cosimo to lend them La Pucelle”
Encyclopédie by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert: “On the strongest of these bookcases were ranged the tomes of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopaedia”
Books that mention The Baron in the Trees (1)
The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino: Referenced as Calvino's own earlier novel, its protagonist a kind of Don Quixote of the Philosophy of the Enlightenment