The Baron in the Trees
It was in Signora Ingrosso’s modern Italian literature class that I fell in love–not only with the devastatingly witty Signora Ingrosso but with Il barone rampante (“The Baron in the Trees”), Italo Calvino’s breathtakingly imaginative, witty, and sometimes heartbreaking 1957 novel. Set in the 18th century, it revolves around a young nobleman named Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo who climbs up into the trees one day and never comes down. Part political satire on Rousseau’s ideals, part comic fable, part paean to the individual spirit, part children’s adventure tale, Calvino’s book has the intellectual rigor and curiosity of a Jorge Luis Borges story, the humor and wide-eyed innocence of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, and the romantic pathos of a Chaplin film.
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The infatuation with Professor Ingrosso was short-lived, but the enchantment with Calvino was not. When he died in Siena in 1985 at the age of 61, he left behind a treasure trove of writings: stories, lectures, novels, and essays confirming his status as one of the keenest and wittiest voices of post-World War II literature. His love of reading pervades the absolutely brilliant If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler; his knack for graceful storytelling marks his Italian Folktales and his own fairy tales, The Cloven Viscount and The Nonexistent Knight; and an astute understanding of the child’s point of view distinguishes his first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nest. But it’s still The Baron in the Trees that has the greatest power to charm, captivate, and move to laughter and tears.
In perhaps the most effective dramatic sequence, Cosimo encounters a legendary thief who later turns from crime to literature–in fact, reading becomes an overwhelming addiction. In a sly spin on the tales of the Arabian nights, Cosimo reads continuously to the thief, even as the man is taken to the gallows. The thief’s last words: “How does it end?” Beautifully performed, these brief minutes contain within them all of Calvino’s passion for literature. Moments like this one help compensate for some of Lookingglass’s missteps.
The following plays are reviewed this week in Section Two: Borglum! The Mount Rushmore Musical and Oleanna.
