The Baron In Trees

Italo Calvino's "The Baron in the Trees" is the story of an Italian boy who leaves his aristocratic childhood home in favor of the expanse of adjoining trees that cover the surrounding town and countryside and lives the remainder of his life in the world he finds there. His name is Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, and he applies his ingenious and free-thinking perspective to finding ways of continuing to learn, innovating both for the betterment of his own lifestyle and for the people who live below him, and to cultivating a one-of-a-kind, passion-filled love life. He lives at once removed from and intimately bonded with his family and fellow townspeople, and dies as creatively and note-worthily as he lived, leaving his friends and family inspired by his story.

The second chapter finds Cosimo still in the holm oak the morning following that fateful evening. The Generalessa has gotten over her initial panic, and she and the Baron decide to take a nonchalant stroll through the garden so they might ignore Cosimo and thereby antagonize him out of the trees. The most helpful affect of their stroll is that it allows Biagio to lay out the geography of the trees into which Cosimo has climbed. The trees, because they are mature and growing so close together, enable Cosimo to pass easily from one to the next. An adept climber, he spies quite happily on all of the goings-on below him. The Abbe Fauchelefleur passes below is too distracted to notice Cosimo tossing bits of nature down at him from his perch. Chapter three contains the account of Biagio's first venture up into the trees to visit his brother, as well as the beginning of his understanding that Cosimo does not intend to return to life on the ground any time soon. He enters by way of the mulberry with an offering of pie. He assures Cosimo that he stole the pie under his own initiative and that he was not sent with it by any of the grown-ups. He apologizes heartily for his lapse in solidarity with his brother and assures him that the meal of snails was wretched, explaining he simply could not endure the scolding. Cosimo begins, upon softening, to describe the exotic garden he has discovered over the brick wall, and Biagio asks if he could please be allowed to come on..... In chapter four, the world of trees into which Cosimo