Calvino transferred to the University of Florence in 1943 and reluctantly passed three more exams in agriculture. By the end of the year, the Germans had succeeded in occupying Liguria and setting up Benito Mussolini's puppet Republic of Salò in northern Italy. Now twenty years old, Calvino refused military service and went into hiding. Reading intensely in a wide array of subjects, he also reasoned politically that, of all the partisan groupings, the communists were the best organized with "the most convincing political line".Calvino recalled this sudden, forced transformation of a dreamy adolescent into a partisan soldier as one bounded by logic since "the logic of the Resistance was the very logic of our urge towards life". Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 146.
Calvino transferred to the University of Florence in 1943 and reluctantly passed three more exams in agriculture. By the end of the year, the Germans had succeeded in occupying Liguria and setting up Benito Mussolini's puppet Republic of Salò in northern Italy. Now twenty years old, Calvino refused military service and went into hiding. Reading intensely in a wide array of subjects, he also reasoned politically that, of all the partisan groupings the communists were the best organized with "the most convincing political line".Calvino recalled this sudden, forced transformation of a dreamy adolescent into a partisan ,soldier as one bounded by logic since "the logic of the Resistance was the very logic of our urge towards life". Calvino, 'Political Autobiography of a Young Man', Hermit in Paris, 146.