Il dubbio e il desiderio. Eva Mameli Calvino

Eva Mameli Calvino was an important botanist who lived from 1886 to 1978. She worked in Sardinia, Cuba and Liguria. Born Eva Mameli, she married Mario Calvino and had a famous writer son, named Italo, for whom she is more often remembered today.

Italo Calvino’s mother, however, had a lively and interesting life of her own: she gave birth in a hut in the middle of a lush Cuban agricultural station, grew the first Italian avocado, wrote hundreds of scientific articles, and if our terraces are flowered with geraniums and cyclamens it is partly thanks to the advice she gave to green-fingered gardeners for years. A reserved, austere, severe figure, and not widely known, she was a scientist at a time when women scientists achieved little prominence, and lived in Italy at a time when it was still possible to make a botanical garden in the grounds of a house. After her death, the grounds were converted into a car park.

The volume is issued in the “OILÀ” series, edited by Chiara Alessi, which presents stories of leading 19th-century women. Women who, on the Italian and international creative scene (from design to fashion, architecture, music, illustration, graphics, photography and literature) distinguished themselves in fields and occupations that were always considered a prerogative of men. The books, designed to be read aloud from beginning to end in forty-five minutes, are accounts of people seen through a special lens with their biographies, works, private lives and public achievements.

The graphic design is by Studio Sonnoli.