Translated from the Italian by Tim Parks, The Road to San Giovanni is a posthumously published collection of five autobiographical essays by one of the masters of Italian literature, ranging from a lyrical portrait of the author's relationship with his father to a perceptive essay on his own youthful obsession with the cinema.

'Italo Calvino was a writer on the grand scale, the kind we no longer know much about in the anglophone literary world' Frank Kermode, Guardian

These autobiographical essays marvellously reconstitute different strata of his past in all the pristine, warm air of immediacy' Sunday Times

'The Road to San Giovanni, urbane and always elegant, shows us what a master we have lost in Italo Calvino' Literary Review