SIENA, Italy -- Novelist Italo Calvino, who fought in the anti-fascist resistance, honed his art in an unheated garret and went on to win international fame as one of the literary greats of his age, died today. He was 61.
Calvino suffered a stroke Sept. 6 at his villa near the seaside resort of Castiglione della Pescaia, about 120 miles northwest of Rome.
He underwent apparently successful surgery the following day to repair an aneurysm and regained consciousness. But his condition worsened a few days later and he slipped into a coma. He suffered another stroke late Tuesday and the coma was pronounced irreversible.
His doctor, Antonio Stanca, announced his death early today.
In a front page New York Times Book Review article, the late John Gardner called Calvino 'possibly Italy's most brilliant living writer' and classed him with Kobo Abe, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Other critics place him in the intellectual school of writers that includes Kafka, Pirandello, Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet and John Barth.
Born Oct. 15, 1923, at Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, where his Italian parents were working as tropical agronomists, Calvino returned to Italy as a child and grew up on his parents's experimental farm in San Remo and in the northern city of Turin.
He enrolled in the Faculty of Science at the University of Turin, where his father taught. But with the outbreak of World War II, he fled into the hills to join Italy's anti-fascist partisans.
Calvino emerged from the war a Communist, moved into an unheated garret, went to work for the new publishing house of Giulio Einaudi and began writing.
He resigned from the Communist Party after the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and withdrew from active politics.
His first book, 'The Path to the Nest of Spiders,' was his only realistic novel. The book, based on his experience with the partisans, was a success.
But the works for which he won his international reputation were far different -- literary experiments combining fantasy, folklore, philosophy and science.
They include 'The Cloven Viscount,' 'The Nonexistent Knight' and 'The Baron in the Trees' -- published together in English as 'Our Ancestors' -- 'Cosmicomics,' 'Invisible Cities,' 'The Castle of Crossed Destinies' and 'Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City.' He also edited 'Italian Folktales.'
Once established as a writer, Calvin moved first from Turin to Rome, then spent time in the United States and settled in Paris.
In recent years he divided his time between his apartments in Paris and Rome and his country villa.
He is survived by his wife, Esther, and a daughter, Giovana.
Calvino's brother, Floriano, said the family would bury him at Castiglione della Pescaia, near his seaside villa -- 'the place where Italo lived his most beautiful moments.'
