The Baron in the Trees

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This article is about the novel. For the racing team, see Il Barone Rampante.

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The Baron in the Trees (Italian: ll Barone Rampante) is a novel written by Italo Calvino.

Calvino writes that, “Finding the right distance to be present and at the same time detached: that was the problem of The Baron in the Trees (Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris, (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 184, 7 January 1978.).

After the novella, The Cloven Viscount (1952), was published, Calvino wrote numerous short stories and then returned to the novel in 1957 with The Baron in the Trees. In the novel, a young boy, Cosimo, decides once and for all that he has had enough: enough of his family, enough of his proper role (as a future Baron), enough of his sister (a terribly miserable young woman), enough of decorum, and, literally, enough of everything on the ground. He escapes to the trees, becoming the Baron in the trees. While initially helped and sometimes cared for by his younger brother (Biagio, the narrator of the story), the Baron eventually becomes self-sufficient but finds that the more he tries to remove himself, the more he helps everyone on the earth. In the midst of numerous events, the Baron forever holds a love for a young girl, a neighbor, Viola, who moved away when they were young. When she returns, what happens changes the course of the lives of everyone: Cosimo, Viola, Biagio, and the community.

While sometimes dismissed as a cute fable, this story finds its very strength in its ability to be read and analyzed on a number of levels: as a romance story, environmentally, narratologically, sociologically, and in questioning the role of the individual and the community.

The novel received the Viareggio Prize in 1957. However, Calvino "refused the prize on the grounds that its acceptance simply helped shore up an outmoded institution, the literary prize!" (J.R. Woodhouse, “Fantasy, Alienation and the Racconti of Italo Calvino,” in Forum of Modern Language Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4, October, 1970, pp. 399–412.)