Cesare Pavese - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Cesare Pavese was born in Santo Stefano Belbo, in the province of Cuneo. It was the village where his father was born and where the family returned for the summer holidays each year. He started infant classes in San Stefano Belbo, but the rest of his education was in schools in Turin. His most important teacher at the time was Augusto Monti, writer and educator, whose writing style was devoid of all rhetoric.

As a young man of letters, Pavese had a particular interest in English-language literature, graduating from the University of Turin with a thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman. Among his mentors at the university was Leone Ginzburg, expert on Russian literature and literary critic, husband of the writer Natalia Ginzburg and father of the future historian Carlo Ginzburg. In those years, Pavese translated both classic and recent American and British authors that were then new to the Italian public.

Read more about this topic:  Cesare Pavese

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:

    Our bad neighbor makes us early stirrers,
    Which is both healthful and good husbandry.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
    William James (1842–1910)

    I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.
    Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)