The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

First published:Il barone rampante, 1957 (English translation, 1959)

Type of work: Fantasy

Time of work: The late eighteenth century

Locale: Ombrosa, a fictional estate in northern Italy

Principal Characters:

• Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, the protagonist, heir to the estate of Ombrosa
• Biaggio Piovasco di Rondò, the narrator, Cosimo’s younger brother
• Arminio Piovasco di Rondò, the Baron of Ombrosa, father of Cosimo and Biaggio
• Corradina di Rondò, the Baroness of Ombrosa, nicknamed “The Generalessa”
• Battista di Rondò, their eccentric daughter, sister of Cosimo and Biaggio

The Novel

Set in the peaceful valley of Ombrosa during the period of intellectual and social ferment which characterized the Age of Reason, Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees relates the story of Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, heir to the immense estate of the Piovasci. Cosimo rebels against the rule-burdened atmosphere in which he is reared by climbing into the trees on his family’s estate at the age of twelve and remaining there for the rest of his life. His refusal to eat the snail soup and main course of snails prepared by his sister Battista is the issue which sends him into the trees, but he soon decides to make them his permanent home.

Cosimo’s family makes a few perfunctory attempts to get him down. His mother, nicknamed “the Generalessa” because of her Austrian military ancestry, worries at first about Cosimo’s falling. (His brother Biaggio, who becomes both observer of and commentator on Cosimo’s unusual way of life, finds this concern ironic, noting that it would not have bothered their mother in the least to see her sons under cannon fire.) Eventually, she rather enjoys catching sight of Cosimo in one tree or another through her telescope, and she sends him messages with her military signal flags.

Cosimo’s varied adventures in the trees make for enjoyable reading. At first these are boyish pranks, such as throwing a piece of bark at the boys’ pompous tutor, the Abbe Fauchelfleur, or hair-raising encounters with the “fruit thieves,” neighborhood boys who steal from the lush orchards in the area. One experience, however, has a lasting effect on Cosimo: meeting Violante (Viola) Ondariva. Their families have not spoken for years, but within minutes they are fast friends, and Viola is taken with Cosimo’s unusual way of life. She even helps him escape from the fruit thieves in the guise of “Sinforosa.”

Though Cosimo is a solitary figure, he does not avoid people. Indeed, as he matures, he provides useful services such as delivering messages. His agility allows him to pass easily from one tree to another, and, since he is bound by neither walls nor fences, he can travel great distances quickly. When huntsmen lose their quarry, he directs them to the fox. His perspective allows him to see which streams are best for fishing, and he often dangles his line from a convenient low-hanging branch. He finds it difficult but does, at least at first, attend High Mass by kneeling on a limb which is at the same height as a large church window.

Cosimo becomes close friends with his father’s illegitimate brother, Cavilier Enea Silvio Carrega, who is also the family lawyer. Carrega is a secret beekeeper with beehives scattered throughout the valley. Cosimo helps him to gather bees and to devise a grandiose but unrealized scheme for irrigating the neighboring farmland. It does not bother Cosimo that the irrigation project never comes to pass. He realizes that tending the hollowed-out tree trunks that would carry the water would eventually prove a burden, binding him more closely to the earth. Escaping the burdens of everyday life was, after all, one of Cosimo’s primary reasons for living in the trees.

Carrega has lived a life of secret resentment for many years. The Piovasco estate, where he lived as permanent houseguest, is the grandest in the valley, but no share of this wealth could ever be his since he is illegitimate. His smuggling activities, eventually revealed by Cosimo in a way that does not tarnish Carrega’s reputation, represent a desperate attempt at revenge. Cosimo, by contrast, feels none of these burdens. Though heir to the Piovasco estate and fortune, and though reconciled at last with his father, he assigns all of his rights to his mother and brother. In return he receives a stipend adequate for his own maintenance, regular consignments of books by the authors he most enjoys, and the affection of many who live in the region.

In many respects Cosimo enjoys a surprisingly normal life in the trees. Though alone, he is rarely lonely. He meets a kindred spirit in Ursula, daughter of a noble exile from Charles III’s Spain, Federico Alonso Sanchez y Tobasco. Federico’s court has been granted permission to pass through northern Italy but only on the condition that they do not set foot on the earth. The entire entourage thus becomes tree-dwellers, though, unlike Cosimo, not by choice. Ursula desires to remain with Cosimo in the trees even after her family receives permission to return to Spain. She obediently, though reluctantly, accompanies them at last. Cosimo accepts this philosophically, as he does all human relationships, recognizing that all things end and pass away, even what one most treasures.

Cosimo lives in the trees well beyond the age of sixty-five and does not come down though he becomes old and infirm. His death, as unusual as his life, presumably occurs when he grabs hold of an anchor fastened to a passing hot-air balloon. Thus Cosimo’s body, though of the earth, never returns to it again.

The Characters

All of the characters in Calvino’s novel are eccentric. The plainest and most conventional of them is Biaggio, the narrator. Biaggio profits handsomely from his brother Cosimo’s life in the trees, for he becomes heir to the estate; nevertheless, Biaggio clearly regrets his own comparatively plain life, though he recognizes that he never would have been able to make a similar choice. Biaggio is, like many, successful by the world’s standards but conscious of what might have been.

The boys’ father, Arminio, the elder baron, has as his great ambition the regaining of his lapsed title, Duke of Ombrosa. His obsession with “genealogies and successions and family rivalries and alliances” contrasts markedly with Cosimo’s nonchalance. Cavilier Carrega, Arminio’s illegitimate brother, is only too well aware that though he lives amid Ombrosa’s luxury none of its wealth will ever belong to him. He relies upon deceit (going so far as to steal food from the family table) and smuggling as revenge against his fate.

Arminio supports the Austrian monarchy, and this makes him conservative to the point of being politically reactionary. His wife, Corradina di Rondò, whose father, Konrad von Kurtewitz, commanded the troops which occupied the Genoese Republic, is a strange combination of the maternal and the military. Battista di Rondò, Cosimo’s sister, inherits her mother’s flair for the dramatic. She is given to spiteful scenes and retaliations. Cosimo’s refusal to eat the snail soup she has prepared causes him to be sent from the table and provokes his escape to the trees. It is not Battista’s snails but his family’s aristocratic shallowness which Cosimo actually rejects.

Critical Context

All of Calvino’s works reflect an interest in fantasy and the fantastic. The unusual feature of The Baron in the Trees is that it reflects the supposedly contemporary idea of escape from an oppressive world against the intellectual and political ferment of the late eighteenth century. This was the period of the French philosophes, Deism, which claimed that God created the world but takes no active part in running it, and the American and French Revolutions.

In his later writings, Calvino played variations on fantastic themes drawn from semiology, the study of signs. Le cosmicomiche (1965; Cosmicomics, 1968) considers the relationship of picture and meaning. Le citta invisibili (1972; Invisible Cities, 1974) reimagines Marco Polo—who, in Calvino’s rendering, uses evocative language in the most precise way possible to describe cities which only he has seen to Kubla Khan, the Mongol emperor of China. Il castello dei destini incrociati (1969, 1973; The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1977) employs speechless tellers of tales who use tarot cards to tell the stories of their lives, and Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 1981) presents numerous variations on a single event, a novel read with pages of another work mistakenly bound within it. Calvino’s creative works are often read alongside his countryman Umberto Eco’s essays on semiotics. Eco is himself the author of the semiotic mystery Il nome della rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose, 1983).

Bibliography

Calvino, Italo. The Uses of Literature, 1986.

Carter, Albert Howard. Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy, 1987.

Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays, 1986. Edited by Helen Wolff and Kurt Wolff.

Olken, I.T. With Pleated Eye and Garnet Wing: Symmetries of Italo Calvino, 1984.

Perosa, Sergio. “The Heirs of Calvino and the Eco Effect,” in The New York Times Book Review. XCII (August 16, 1987), p. 1.