1. Roberto Calasso was an Italian writer and publisher.
16 Facts About Roberto Calasso
1. 2.
Apart from his mother tongue, Calasso was fluent in French, English, Spanish, German, Latin and ancient Greek.
3.
Roberto Calasso has been called "a literary institution of one".
4.
Roberto Calasso was born in Florence in 1941, into a family of the Tuscan upper class, well connected with some of the great Italian intellectuals of their time.
5.
Roberto Calasso's maternal grandfather Ernesto Codignola was a professor of philosophy at Florence University.
6.
Roberto Calasso's uncle, Tristano Codignola, was a partisan during World War II who after the war joined the political life of the new republic, and was for a while Minister of Education.
7.
Roberto Calasso's father Francesco was a law professor, first at Florence University and then in Rome, where he eventually became dean of his faculty.
8.
Roberto Calasso was arrested by the fascist militia after the assassination of Giovanni Gentile and sentenced to be killed in reprisal, but was saved both by the intervention of friends of Gentile, with whom the family had connections on the maternal side, and by the German consul Gerhard Wolf.
9.
At 12 Roberto Calasso met and was greatly influenced by a professor at Padua University, Enzo Turolla, and they became lifelong friends.
10.
In 1954 the family moved to Rome, where Roberto Calasso developed a passion for cinema.
11.
Roberto Calasso's books have been translated into more than 20 languages.
12.
Roberto Calasso was the author of an unnamed ongoing work reflecting on the culture of modernity, which began with The Ruin of Kasch in 1983, a book admired by Italo Calvino.
13.
Roberto Calasso served as the president of the International Alexander Lernet-Holenia Society, which promotes the publication, translation and study of this multi-genre Austrian writer and his focus on the identity crisis of his characters at odds with postimperial Austria and Central Europe.
14.
Roberto Calasso died in Milan on the evening of 28 July 2021, at the age of 80, a day before his two new books Bobi and Meme Scianca were released.
15.
Roberto Calasso was survived by his wife, the Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy, and two children, Josephine and Tancredi Roberto Calasso, both from his previous marriage to the German writer Anna Katharina Frohlich.
16.
Roberto Calasso was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2015.