On March 7, 2025, the 92nd Street Y in New York launched an online course titled Reading Italo Calvino with Joseph Luzzi. Offered through Roundtable—92NY’s online learning platform—the program is dedicated to three of Calvino’s most celebrated works: The Baron in the Trees, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Luzzi—writer, scholar of Italian literature, and professor at Bard College—guides participants through the texts with the eye of an experienced reader rather than a distant critic. His style is precise but accessible. He references Derrida and Kundera, touches on semiotics and structuralism, yet the tone remains light, the focus always on the rhythm and richness of Calvino’s language.
Though Calvino died in 1985, while working on his unfinished Six Memos for the Next Millennium, his presence in the course is unmistakable. Not as nostalgia, but as something strangely current. He never knew the digital world, nor the culture of immediacy it brought—but somehow, he had already anticipated it. Luzzi doesn’t try to explain Calvino. He reads him, with care and with curiosity. He invites participants to do the same, to step into the strange architecture of these books and find their own way through.
When he speaks about Invisible Cities, Luzzi calls it “a love letter to Venice.” About If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, he says it’s “a love letter to reading.” These aren’t grand declarations, just observations, offered quietly, as if to say, this is how the books feel, if you let them. Of the three, Invisible Cities seems to resonate most with the readers. Structured as a series of imagined conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, it reads more like a poetic atlas than a novel. The cities described—dreamlike, symbolic, shifting—are built less from stone than from thought. Luzzi notes that the book has no real plot, no clear answers. It’s made of fragments and echoes. And that’s part of the challenge. Several students in the course admit to feeling lost. The absence of a beginning, middle, and end unsettles them. There’s no familiar arc, no clear destination. But Luzzi encourages them to stay with that discomfort. With Calvino, he says, the point isn’t to arrive—it’s to learn how to see.
That idea runs through the whole course: reading not as a way of collecting facts, but as a way of thinking differently. Calvino doesn’t guide the reader. He opens a space. He offers forms that feel incomplete, and perhaps deliberately so. And that’s where Luzzi returns, at the end of one session, to what may be the most lasting impression of these books—not their cleverness or their complexity, but their company. “Italo Calvino is not just a twentieth-century writer”, he says. “He’s a traveling companion—someone to walk with as we move through the century, or whatever’s left of it. He shows us how to cross it with intelligence, and with the light force of imagination”.
The Calvino course is part of Roundtable’s wider slate of literature and humanities programming. The platform offers both live and on-demand courses spanning Arts, Music, History, Literature, Politics, and Science. Italian themes are a recurring presence: for instance, the on-demand course Courts and Artists in the Italian Renaissance, or The Divine Michelangelo: Painter, Sculptor, Architect. Coming up live on April 1 is Machiavelli for Our Times, a timely exploration of the Florentine thinker’s legacy.
