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“There he is!” He was at the top of still another tree, swaying as if in the wind, and jumping.
“He’s fallen! No! There he is!” All that could be seen, above the waving green, was his tricorn and queue.
Let’s meet the Tarzan of the Alps: Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, self-exiled from the family mansion after an altercation with his father, the Baron of Ombrosa, over a bowl of snail soup. The twelve years old boy takes teenage rebellion to another level. He swears that his feet will never touch earth as long as he lives.
A promise Cosimo was going to keep against all odds.
>>><<<>>><<<
Before we start on the adventurous life of the young baron who proved that you can choose how to live your life if you are true to your own self and to your principles, that you don’t have to follow in the sometimes foolish and old-fashioned ways of your ancestors, I have one observation to make:
Don’t pay attention to the fact that this is classed as the second book in a trilogy. Cosimo’s story has nothing to do with events or with people from The Cloven Viscount. . New readers can start their journey here without any trouble.
I believe the only reason the three historical novels are grouped together is the author’s interest in the concept of national identity, one that comes not only from the famous battles or the kings and generals who led them, but in the folk tales and in the relationship people have with the land they inhabit.
Calvino wrote the first book, and then the other two in quick succession, after a long period of collecting Italian folk tales on a newspaper and editor assignment. He then decided to write his own fantastic tales that mirror and comment on the actual historical events.
>>><<<>>><<<
I listened to the scattered whispering and tried to imagine it heard without the protection of the familiar background of the house, from which he was only a few yards. Alone with the night around him, clinging to the only friendly object: the rough bark of a tree, scored with innumerable little tunnels where the larvae slept.
The story is told by Biagio, the baron’s younger brother and witness from the start to both the struggles and the enthusiasm of Cosimo’s new way of life. What may have started just as a way to demonstrate his independence from his father and from the rest of his family, proved very soon to be for Cosimo a complete new way to look at life and at the people around him.
From the tree Cosimo looked at the world; everything seen from up there was different, which was fun in itself.
Very few people, starting with his father, understood the reason the young boy refused to come down from his trees, despite the many difficulties he had in adapting to what was in practice a homeless existence, even after his initial anger burned itself out.
Cosimo’s decision proved to be a rational, philosophical one and not the impulse of a moment. I wanted to compare his life with that of the stylites of early Christendom, who retreated from life to meditate on top of their pillars, but there is a major difference here: our baron is embracing life in all its forms, he cherishes both nature and the people who live under his trees. His life is not a retreat in asceticism, but a new perspective, granted by his bird view angle on events, on the social and emotional rules we live by. The first rejection of Cosimo’s young life was probably instinctive: he didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his generally clueless and foolish father, whose most important dreams concern his rise in rank among his equally useless peers.
... the Cavalier Enea Silvio Carrega. This vague, elusive little man (nobody ever knew where he was and what he was doing), Cosimo discovered to be the only one of the whole family who had a great number of pursuits and none of them useless.
Cosimo finds a better role model in his father’s half-uncle and better company among the wild urchins who steal fruits from the orchards in Ombrosa, among the bandits and the outcasts who take refuge in the wild parts of his domain. A growing social awareness and a choosing of sides in the struggle between those who have and those who have not is one of the unplanned results of Cosimo’s revolutionary stance, announcing in a way the actual revolutions that will take place late in the century and that will eventually reach Ombrosa.
Around Porta Capperi, in huts and thatched houses, broken-down carts and tents, were huddled the poorest folk of Ombrosa, so poor that they were kept outside the town gates and away from the fields, people who had drifted there from distant places whence they had been thrust by the famine and poverty which were on the increase in every state.
Speaking of Ombrosa, there is something in the place that made the whole story of the baron who travels only by jumping from oak to elm to pine to olive tree to peach tree and so on, and that is the story of the natural world we destroyed in the name of progress. Cosimo was lucky to have his choice of habitat. My own birth place was once a huge forest, covering hundreds of miles... and then they discovered oil underground.
This was the world of sap amid which we lived, we inhabitants of Ombrosa, almost without our noticing it.
The first to give any real thought to all this was Cosimo.
I don’t know if it’s true, the story they tell in books, that in ancient days a monkey could have left Rome and skipped from tree to tree till it reached Spain, without ever touching earth. The only place so thick with trees in my day was the whole length, from end to end, of the gulf of Ombrosa and its valley right up to the mountain crests: the area was famous everywhere for this.
>>><<<>>><<<
The book can be separated into several main periods in Cosimo’s growing understanding of life. In the beginning, it was his joy at his new surroundings and his adaptation to life in the wild. Then, it was his contact with the people of Ombrosa, in particular with a group of street urchins, with a wild girl living on a nearby property with an exotic garden, and with a group of outlaws hiding in the forest. Even later, we meet Cosimo as a man of letters, a man of action, a man in love and a man alone.
To understand why Cosimo had little incentive to come down from his trees, all we need to know is that he had access to the most important things in his life: his books. The young man and the bandit leader shared a passion for reading, in the beginning for the romance stories popular at the time, leading to encyclopedias and philosophical treaties later on.
And so began the friendship between my brother and the brigand. As soon as Gian dei Brughi had finished a book, he would quickly return it to Cosimo, take another out on loan, hurry off to hide in his secret refuge, and plunge into reading.
Reading can become an occupational hazard for a bandit whose very survival depends on his awareness of his surroundings and on his quick reaction to changing circumstances, and not on his escaping into imaginary worlds. For Cosimo it means an opening of new horizons, his access to places beyond the reach of the tress he uses for transportation and a sure way to stave off boredom when his isolation from his peers grows heavy.
And what with handling the books, judging and acquiring them and getting to know of new ones, what with his reading for Gian del Brughi and his own increasing need to read as well, Cosimo acquired such passion for reading and for all human knowledge, that the hours from dawn to dusk were not enough for what he would have liked to read, and he, too, would go on by the light of a lantern.
... he considered books as rather like birds and it saddened him to see them caged or still.
The celebration of the written word, of imagination and of curiosity, is not something new to us old fans of Italo Calvino. Neither is his subversive sense of humour and his playful post-modernist subtext. Among the many revelations that come to Cosimo as he sits on top of a tree is the relative value of truthfulness in storytelling, the way form can help convey message:
In fact he was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful – the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality.
>>><<<>>><<<
So what if Cosimo is a bit of a liar who likes to embroider around truth with some fantastical if improbable adventures in hunting, either wild beasts, bandits and pirates or pretty ladies lost in the woods? The people still gather in the town square to listen to him perched on an elm tree and to marvel at his exploits. To the Ombrosans, Cosimo is more than a mascot – he is their friend, hero and saviour, a leader and a wise man when fighting fires, famine or invading armies. Some critics like to find political subtext in Calvino’s fables, and they are probably right. Cosimo’s emancipation from his class upbringing is clearly sympathetic to leftist causes. His independence and his focus on personal choice, on education and leadership might reflect a period in the author’s life when he moved away from Communist dogma and into a more nuanced, humanist approach.
This he understood: that association renders men stronger and brings out each person’s best gifts, and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest decent capable people there are for whom it is worth giving one’s best (while living for oneself very often the very opposite happens, of seeing people’s other side, the side which makes one keep one’s hand always on the hilt of one’s sword).
The historical period chosen for the novel is not arbitrary. Starting in 1756, all across Europe new ideas gain ground and prepare the way for a new order of things – a revolution that will reach Ombrosa and give birth to a national conscience. Years pass and while an older Cosimo stays up in his trees, reading his imported books and exchanging letters with the brighter minds of his age, his brother Biagio travels through Europe, witnessing both the decadence, the prejudices and the unrest that preface change. Biagio is proud to defend his brother’s unorthodox behaviour:
Once in an almanac I saw a figure with the words beneath: “L’homme sauvage d’Ombreuse (Rep. Genoise). Vit seulement sur les arbres.”
They had represented him all covered in leaves, with a long beard and a long tail, eating a locust. That figure was in the Chapter of Monsters, between the Hermaphrodite and the Siren.
“My brother considers,” answered I, “that anyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary distance from it,” and Voltaire seemed to appreciate this reply.
History will prove the revolutionaries right, but the old order will not give up its privileges without a struggle. First the government in Genoa, later occupation armies from Austria and imperial French troops will pass through Ombrosa, all trying to put down the fires of independence and self-determination, expanded from a single boy living up in the trees to all and sunder.
All over the hillside people moved. It was impossible to distinguish now between vintage and crowd: men, grapes, women, sprigs, clippers, festoons, scarasse, musket, baskets, horses, barbed wire, fists, mule’s kicks, shins, teats – all singing “Ca ira!”
>>><<<>>><<<
I couldn’t finish my review without touching on the romantic part of Cosimo’s life – sketched here with the same combination of sneaky humour, passion and subversion of norms that is so particular to Italo Calvino.
In his daydreams, he would see himself courting girls of exquisite beauty: but how could he fall in love up in the trees? In his fantasies, he managed to avoid specifying where it would happen; on earth, or up in the element where he lived now: a place without a place, he would imagine; a world reached by going up not down. Yes, that was it. Perhaps there was a tree so high that by climbing it, he would touch another world – the moon.
Being homeless and airborne is not the best way to court the girls, but Cosimo has some aces up his sleeve, like being presentable, athletic and well-spoken (and with a noble particle attached to his name). A teenage boy’s shyness is soon replaced by a remarkable appetite for mischief that finds more than one local maid willing to explore the wild woods in search of excitement.
A certain oak tree, in fact, is still called the Oak of the Five Sparrows, and we old men know what that means.
True love is also on the menu, even predestined for a young man of such romantic disposition. The Jane to his Tarzan is named Sinforosa Viola Violante of Ondariva, the little girl who challenged him in his first days of rebellion and who returns a couple of decades later as a still wild seductress and free spirit.
Viola will be the true love of Cosimo’s life, but as it happens in so many couples they are both too alike and too wild for their romance to last. especially when the lady in question starts to play dangerous liaisons games with visiting foreign officers from Genoa
>>><<<>>><<<
I read somewhere that this novel is the second most popular novel by Italo Calvino, after If on a Winter Night a Traveler . It is easy to understand why, now that I have finished the lecture: the author finds here the right balance between a fun adventure and a thought provoking invitation to reconsider the way we interact with the world and with each other. Even my review grew in length well beyond my initial intentions since I didn’t want to leave any bookmarked paragraph or idea out.
Cosimo’s story is layered and rich in subtext, but it is also very entertaining and well written, with the wild flight of fancies that kept some readers away from Calvino kept well under control.
Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo will definitely stay with me long after his spectacular exit from the scene.
I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did. Only by being so frankly himself as he was till his death could he give something to all men.
“He’s fallen! No! There he is!” All that could be seen, above the waving green, was his tricorn and queue.
Let’s meet the Tarzan of the Alps: Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, self-exiled from the family mansion after an altercation with his father, the Baron of Ombrosa, over a bowl of snail soup. The twelve years old boy takes teenage rebellion to another level. He swears that his feet will never touch earth as long as he lives.
A promise Cosimo was going to keep against all odds.
>>><<<>>><<<
Before we start on the adventurous life of the young baron who proved that you can choose how to live your life if you are true to your own self and to your principles, that you don’t have to follow in the sometimes foolish and old-fashioned ways of your ancestors, I have one observation to make:
Don’t pay attention to the fact that this is classed as the second book in a trilogy. Cosimo’s story has nothing to do with events or with people from The Cloven Viscount. . New readers can start their journey here without any trouble.
I believe the only reason the three historical novels are grouped together is the author’s interest in the concept of national identity, one that comes not only from the famous battles or the kings and generals who led them, but in the folk tales and in the relationship people have with the land they inhabit.
Calvino wrote the first book, and then the other two in quick succession, after a long period of collecting Italian folk tales on a newspaper and editor assignment. He then decided to write his own fantastic tales that mirror and comment on the actual historical events.
>>><<<>>><<<
I listened to the scattered whispering and tried to imagine it heard without the protection of the familiar background of the house, from which he was only a few yards. Alone with the night around him, clinging to the only friendly object: the rough bark of a tree, scored with innumerable little tunnels where the larvae slept.
The story is told by Biagio, the baron’s younger brother and witness from the start to both the struggles and the enthusiasm of Cosimo’s new way of life. What may have started just as a way to demonstrate his independence from his father and from the rest of his family, proved very soon to be for Cosimo a complete new way to look at life and at the people around him.
From the tree Cosimo looked at the world; everything seen from up there was different, which was fun in itself.
Very few people, starting with his father, understood the reason the young boy refused to come down from his trees, despite the many difficulties he had in adapting to what was in practice a homeless existence, even after his initial anger burned itself out.
Cosimo’s decision proved to be a rational, philosophical one and not the impulse of a moment. I wanted to compare his life with that of the stylites of early Christendom, who retreated from life to meditate on top of their pillars, but there is a major difference here: our baron is embracing life in all its forms, he cherishes both nature and the people who live under his trees. His life is not a retreat in asceticism, but a new perspective, granted by his bird view angle on events, on the social and emotional rules we live by. The first rejection of Cosimo’s young life was probably instinctive: he didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his generally clueless and foolish father, whose most important dreams concern his rise in rank among his equally useless peers.
... the Cavalier Enea Silvio Carrega. This vague, elusive little man (nobody ever knew where he was and what he was doing), Cosimo discovered to be the only one of the whole family who had a great number of pursuits and none of them useless.
Cosimo finds a better role model in his father’s half-uncle and better company among the wild urchins who steal fruits from the orchards in Ombrosa, among the bandits and the outcasts who take refuge in the wild parts of his domain. A growing social awareness and a choosing of sides in the struggle between those who have and those who have not is one of the unplanned results of Cosimo’s revolutionary stance, announcing in a way the actual revolutions that will take place late in the century and that will eventually reach Ombrosa.
Around Porta Capperi, in huts and thatched houses, broken-down carts and tents, were huddled the poorest folk of Ombrosa, so poor that they were kept outside the town gates and away from the fields, people who had drifted there from distant places whence they had been thrust by the famine and poverty which were on the increase in every state.
Speaking of Ombrosa, there is something in the place that made the whole story of the baron who travels only by jumping from oak to elm to pine to olive tree to peach tree and so on, and that is the story of the natural world we destroyed in the name of progress. Cosimo was lucky to have his choice of habitat. My own birth place was once a huge forest, covering hundreds of miles... and then they discovered oil underground.
This was the world of sap amid which we lived, we inhabitants of Ombrosa, almost without our noticing it.
The first to give any real thought to all this was Cosimo.
I don’t know if it’s true, the story they tell in books, that in ancient days a monkey could have left Rome and skipped from tree to tree till it reached Spain, without ever touching earth. The only place so thick with trees in my day was the whole length, from end to end, of the gulf of Ombrosa and its valley right up to the mountain crests: the area was famous everywhere for this.
>>><<<>>><<<
The book can be separated into several main periods in Cosimo’s growing understanding of life. In the beginning, it was his joy at his new surroundings and his adaptation to life in the wild. Then, it was his contact with the people of Ombrosa, in particular with a group of street urchins, with a wild girl living on a nearby property with an exotic garden, and with a group of outlaws hiding in the forest. Even later, we meet Cosimo as a man of letters, a man of action, a man in love and a man alone.
To understand why Cosimo had little incentive to come down from his trees, all we need to know is that he had access to the most important things in his life: his books. The young man and the bandit leader shared a passion for reading, in the beginning for the romance stories popular at the time, leading to encyclopedias and philosophical treaties later on.
And so began the friendship between my brother and the brigand. As soon as Gian dei Brughi had finished a book, he would quickly return it to Cosimo, take another out on loan, hurry off to hide in his secret refuge, and plunge into reading.
Reading can become an occupational hazard for a bandit whose very survival depends on his awareness of his surroundings and on his quick reaction to changing circumstances, and not on his escaping into imaginary worlds. For Cosimo it means an opening of new horizons, his access to places beyond the reach of the tress he uses for transportation and a sure way to stave off boredom when his isolation from his peers grows heavy.
And what with handling the books, judging and acquiring them and getting to know of new ones, what with his reading for Gian del Brughi and his own increasing need to read as well, Cosimo acquired such passion for reading and for all human knowledge, that the hours from dawn to dusk were not enough for what he would have liked to read, and he, too, would go on by the light of a lantern.
... he considered books as rather like birds and it saddened him to see them caged or still.
The celebration of the written word, of imagination and of curiosity, is not something new to us old fans of Italo Calvino. Neither is his subversive sense of humour and his playful post-modernist subtext. Among the many revelations that come to Cosimo as he sits on top of a tree is the relative value of truthfulness in storytelling, the way form can help convey message:
In fact he was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful – the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality.
>>><<<>>><<<
So what if Cosimo is a bit of a liar who likes to embroider around truth with some fantastical if improbable adventures in hunting, either wild beasts, bandits and pirates or pretty ladies lost in the woods? The people still gather in the town square to listen to him perched on an elm tree and to marvel at his exploits. To the Ombrosans, Cosimo is more than a mascot – he is their friend, hero and saviour, a leader and a wise man when fighting fires, famine or invading armies. Some critics like to find political subtext in Calvino’s fables, and they are probably right. Cosimo’s emancipation from his class upbringing is clearly sympathetic to leftist causes. His independence and his focus on personal choice, on education and leadership might reflect a period in the author’s life when he moved away from Communist dogma and into a more nuanced, humanist approach.
This he understood: that association renders men stronger and brings out each person’s best gifts, and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest decent capable people there are for whom it is worth giving one’s best (while living for oneself very often the very opposite happens, of seeing people’s other side, the side which makes one keep one’s hand always on the hilt of one’s sword).
The historical period chosen for the novel is not arbitrary. Starting in 1756, all across Europe new ideas gain ground and prepare the way for a new order of things – a revolution that will reach Ombrosa and give birth to a national conscience. Years pass and while an older Cosimo stays up in his trees, reading his imported books and exchanging letters with the brighter minds of his age, his brother Biagio travels through Europe, witnessing both the decadence, the prejudices and the unrest that preface change. Biagio is proud to defend his brother’s unorthodox behaviour:
Once in an almanac I saw a figure with the words beneath: “L’homme sauvage d’Ombreuse (Rep. Genoise). Vit seulement sur les arbres.”
They had represented him all covered in leaves, with a long beard and a long tail, eating a locust. That figure was in the Chapter of Monsters, between the Hermaphrodite and the Siren.
“My brother considers,” answered I, “that anyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary distance from it,” and Voltaire seemed to appreciate this reply.
History will prove the revolutionaries right, but the old order will not give up its privileges without a struggle. First the government in Genoa, later occupation armies from Austria and imperial French troops will pass through Ombrosa, all trying to put down the fires of independence and self-determination, expanded from a single boy living up in the trees to all and sunder.
All over the hillside people moved. It was impossible to distinguish now between vintage and crowd: men, grapes, women, sprigs, clippers, festoons, scarasse, musket, baskets, horses, barbed wire, fists, mule’s kicks, shins, teats – all singing “Ca ira!”
>>><<<>>><<<
I couldn’t finish my review without touching on the romantic part of Cosimo’s life – sketched here with the same combination of sneaky humour, passion and subversion of norms that is so particular to Italo Calvino.
In his daydreams, he would see himself courting girls of exquisite beauty: but how could he fall in love up in the trees? In his fantasies, he managed to avoid specifying where it would happen; on earth, or up in the element where he lived now: a place without a place, he would imagine; a world reached by going up not down. Yes, that was it. Perhaps there was a tree so high that by climbing it, he would touch another world – the moon.
Being homeless and airborne is not the best way to court the girls, but Cosimo has some aces up his sleeve, like being presentable, athletic and well-spoken (and with a noble particle attached to his name). A teenage boy’s shyness is soon replaced by a remarkable appetite for mischief that finds more than one local maid willing to explore the wild woods in search of excitement.
A certain oak tree, in fact, is still called the Oak of the Five Sparrows, and we old men know what that means.
True love is also on the menu, even predestined for a young man of such romantic disposition. The Jane to his Tarzan is named Sinforosa Viola Violante of Ondariva, the little girl who challenged him in his first days of rebellion and who returns a couple of decades later as a still wild seductress and free spirit.
Viola will be the true love of Cosimo’s life, but as it happens in so many couples they are both too alike and too wild for their romance to last. especially when the lady in question starts to play dangerous liaisons games with visiting foreign officers from Genoa
>>><<<>>><<<
I read somewhere that this novel is the second most popular novel by Italo Calvino, after If on a Winter Night a Traveler . It is easy to understand why, now that I have finished the lecture: the author finds here the right balance between a fun adventure and a thought provoking invitation to reconsider the way we interact with the world and with each other. Even my review grew in length well beyond my initial intentions since I didn’t want to leave any bookmarked paragraph or idea out.
Cosimo’s story is layered and rich in subtext, but it is also very entertaining and well written, with the wild flight of fancies that kept some readers away from Calvino kept well under control.
Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo will definitely stay with me long after his spectacular exit from the scene.
I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did. Only by being so frankly himself as he was till his death could he give something to all men.
