“Schools and universities should hammer home the idea that no book which discusses another book can ever say more than the original book under discussion”, writes Italo Calvino in his Preface to Why Read the Classics? (first published in 1991, but now reissued in Penguin Modern Classics together with Six Memos for the Next Millennium). An obvious point perhaps, but one that appears not to have been heeded by some of the more outlandish practitioners of literary criticism in the past twenty years. Calvino goes on to suggest that “the person who derives maximum benefit from a reading of the classics is the one who skilfully alternates classic reading with calibrated doses of contemporary material”. Again, how wise that sounds. There was a time in the late 1980s when it seemed everyone was reading Calvino. A near-quarter century after his death, he hasn’t exactly been forgotten but it would be nice to think that these welcome republications might bring him new readers. In this week’s TLS, Joe Farrell appraises another Calvino reissue, the Cosmicomics, described by Salman Rushdie as “possibly the most enjoyable story collection ever written”.

Umberto Saba (1883-1957) has, according to Peter Hainsworth, “sometimes been rated one of Italy’s best poets of the twentieth century”, and deserves to be ranked alongside Montale and Ungaretti. Hailing from Trieste, that Mitteleuropean city par excellence which is associated in readers’ minds with Joyce, Italo Svevo and, today, the polymath Claudio Magris, Saba has also been hailed by Harold Bloom as “a vital Jewish poet”. Hainsworth assesses a new translation of one his most important works, the Canzoniere (1921), and reveals why Saba affectionately referred to his wife as “an old hen”.

What are we looking at when we gaze down at the Forum in Rome? The distinguished architectural historian David Watkin has written a book in which he uncovers the archaeological and architectural layers that have built up over the centuries. According to our reviewer Masolino d’Amico (himself a longtime resident of the Eternal City), Watkin, “more successfully than any writer before him, . . . makes his reader aware of the multilayered, fascinating history of this unique site”. D’Amico also points out that “what we have now is largely a nineteenth-century reconstruction”.

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