Italo Calvino wrote an essay titled "Why Reading The Classics" in 1981. Before starting the essay, Calvino shared key points of why we consider some works as "classics" regarding others. The first two points are very good, he stated: The classics are those books where you say "I’m reading..." instead of "I’m reading." and the classics are texts that have a special impact, either because they are imposed as permanent or because they remain in the folds of memory, capturing the collective or individual unconscious.

So, it seems that when Calvino thinks on the Classics, he is not referring to Greek works (although they might appear in his list of Classics) but to the books which motivated him as a reader and then illustrated him as a writer. The adjective "classic" is very large and open to interpretation.

Here is the list of the essay. Each chapter is a title where Calvino explains why this and the other work are classics. Did you ever read any of these?

• Odyssey by Homer.
• Anabasis by Xenophon.
• Metamorphoses by Ovid.
• Natural History by Pliny the Elder.
• The Seven Beauties by Nizami Ganjavi.
• Tirant lo Blanch by Joanot Martorell.
• Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto.
• De Consolatione by Gerolamo Cardano.
• Two New Sciences by Galileo Galilei.
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
• Candide: or, The Optimist by Voltaire.
• Jacques the Fatalist by Denis Diderot.
• Balzac´s works.
• Our Mutual Friend by Dickens.
• The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain.
• Two Hussars by Leo Tolstoy.
• Three Tales by Gustave Flaubert.
• Daisy Miller by Henry James.
• The Pavilion on the Links by Robert Louis Stevenson.
• Pasternak´s works.
• That Awful Mess on Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda.
• The Storm & Other Poems by Eugenio Montale.
• Hemingway -- A collection of his works.
• Borges´s works.
• Francis Ponge.
• Raymond Queneau´s philosophy.

I understand what Calvino wanted to express in his essay: those works helped him to become a human, writer, artist, philosopher, poet and so on. The only thing that I dislike is that it is obvious that he was influenced by Italians due to his nationality, and he did not put other great authors such as Dostoyevsky or Kazantzakis. Nonetheless, the list of Calvino is actually good.

But, seriously, I do not know if we could call Montale or Gadda Classics. According to his Italian ancestry, yes. But I missed Don Quixote or Martín Fierro as a Spanish speaker, for example.

What do you consider a classic inside literature? Do you agree with Clavino's notion?