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).

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