The Movies Of Calvino’s Youth
The New York Review of Books has posted a touching remembrance by Italo Calvino of his moviegoing youth, which corresponded to the peak of Hollywood’s Golden Age — the late 1930s. Calvino begins: ‘There were years when I went to the movies almost every day, sometimes even twice a day, and they were the years between 1936 and the war, around the time of my adolescence. Those were years in which cinema was my world. It’s been said many times before that cinema is a form of escape, it’s a stock phrase intended to be a condemnation, and cinema certainly served that purpose for me back then.’
