Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best-known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).

He was lionised in Britain and the United States, and at the time of his death, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer. Calvino was also a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is buried in the garden cemetery of Castiglione della Pescaia in Tuscany.