Italo Calvino Memos | Paola Antonelli and Maria Popova: Quickness, Enchantment, and the Felicity of Storytelling

The second of a series of events dedicated to the Memos written by Italo Calvino that begun with Jonathan Lethem’s lecture on “Lightness” and continues with a conversation between Paola Antonelli and Maria Popova on Quickness, Enchantment, and the Felicity of Storytelling.

In 1984, Italo Calvino was invited to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. Before his death he was able to complete five of the six planned lectures on the imaginative possibilities of language and literature. The lectures, collected as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are now available in a celebrated new translation by Geoffrey Brock.

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) is considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers. Born in Cuba, he was raised in San Remo, Italy, and later lived in Turin, Paris, Rome, and elsewhere. Among his many works are Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and other novels, as well as numerous collections of fiction, folktales, criticism, and essays. His works have been translated into dozens of languages.

Paola Antonelli is senior curator in the department of architecture and design of the Museum of Modern Art, where she has worked since 1994. She has lectured worldwide in settings ranging from peer conferences to global interdisciplinary gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, and she has served on several international architecture and design juries.

Maria Popova is the founder and editor of Brain Pickings. Started in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends and eventually brought online, the site was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive in 2012. Maria describes herself as…”a reader, writer, interestingness hunter-gatherer, and curious mind at large….”