INTERVIEWER
What drew you to Baudelaire?
CALASSO
Baudelaire is the first non-Italian poet I truly read. In my grandfather’s house, there was a very large library and a beautiful studio. Before the studio, there was a room lined with books, and in the center was a big table with papers. As a kid I was there very often, looking at things I didn’t know anything about, and there I found a copy of Les fleurs du mal, in a fine edition done by Crès in the twenties. Crès was a very elegant publisher from a typographical point of view. I stole the book from my grandfather. It is the first and only book I have ever stolen. My grandmother noticed it because she had an eagle eye—besides, the book was inscribed to her by my grandfather. So she did something slightly perverse. She gave it as a gift, not to me, but to my mother. My mother, in her very last years, gave it to me. So there are three inscriptions in the book, and the last one is rather recent.
When I stole it, I must have been twelve. I was starting to learn French and, of course, I was attracted by the title—it was irresistible. I always had a special sense for Baudelaire, which I never had for any other poet—something more direct, more intimate. And I have to admit that the Folie Baudelaire was the book I wrote with the most ease.

INTERVIEWER
How long did it take you?
CALASSO
It took some time, because what you read now is only a part of the whole—I took out so many things. The book is not only about Baudelaire, but about the wave that, influenced by him, ran through France in the nineteenth century, both in literature and in art. Baudelaire was far more than a great poet. He established the keyboard of a sensibility that still lives within us, if we are not total brutes. The Tiepolo book was a big branch of this tree, and the branch detached itself because I felt it was a book and it had to be alone. So Tiepolo Pink was published before the Folie. I can’t judge exactly how long it took, perhaps around five years.

INTERVIEWER
That’s not exactly a rush.
CALASSO
Consider that L’ardore, my latest book, is something that has gone on with me since Ka, so more or less fifteen years. No other book of mine has taken so much time.

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