The story of the Perched Baron, the young rebel in 18th-century Italy who, at the age of 12, refuses to eat the snails imposed by his father's tyranny and takes to the trees, never to return, has enchanted generations of readers. When he wrote it in 1956, Italo Calvino was 33 and about to turn in his Italian Communist Party card, horrified by the silence of Italian leaders after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising - his own snails. Beyond this revolt, the young writer evokes between the lines a position he has long chosen for himself, halfway between the mute beauties of the world and the society of men.
