if on a winter's night a lover...

Italo Calvino's widow is in court trying to prevent further publication of letters he exchanged with a married lover. From the Guardian:

The sex life of Italy's most respected 20th-century novelist was heading for the courts yesterday after his widow instructed lawyers in Rome to seek an injunction banning the publication of further extracts from his passionate correspondence with a married lover.

The row centres on a series of letters written by Italo Calvino in the 1950s to the actress Elsa de' Giorgi. Extracts serialised this month in the newspaper Corriere della Sera testify to a torrid love affair between the writer and the star of, among other films, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom.

Calvino's widow, "Chichita", called their publication a crime. She told a newspaper interviewer: "If I think of what Italo was like, so reserved and modest. I just hope they don't get daily papers in the afterlife."

And the plot's even thicker:

In one letter, written before their affair was consummated, the retiring Calvino told De' Giorgi: "I desire you so much that the first time I take you in my arms I think I'll tear you to pieces, rip off your clothes, roll on top of you, do anything to give vent to this infinite desire to kiss you, hold you, possess you."

The publication of their correspondence has raised issues of copyright as well as propriety, and sparked a new mystery over the disappearance and death of the man whom Calvino cuckolded.

I must admit devouring this story, but feeling very intrusive while doing so.

worm "Temper, Temper," Tuscadero

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