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Difficult Loves

Short story collection by Italo Calvino

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
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Source updated May 17, 2026
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Difficult Loves (Italian: Gli amori difficili) is a 1970 short story collection by Italo Calvino. It concerns love and the difficulty of communication.

Some published versions of the English translation by William Weaver omit a number of the stories, and also include other Calvino stories about the Second World War and postwar period, including those from The Crow Comes Last; some of these were translated by Archibald Colquhoun and Peggy Wright. "The Argentine Ant" and "The Cloud of Smog" (as "Smog") do not appear in this book, but rather in the translated The Watcher and Other Stories. An English translation of "The Adventure of a Skier" was published by The New Yorker in their July 3, 2017 issue.

01Stories

Starred stories are those also included in the incomplete versions of the English translation.

Difficult Loves

  • The Adventure of a Soldier*
  • The Adventure of a Bandit
  • The Adventure of a Bather*
  • The Adventure of a Clerk*
  • The Adventure of a Photographer*
  • The Adventure of a Traveler*
  • The Adventure of a Reader*
  • The Adventure of a Nearsighted Man*
  • The Adventure of a Wife
  • The Adventure of Two Spouses
  • The Adventure of a Poet*
  • The Adventure of a Skier
  • The Adventure of a Motorist

Difficult Life

  • The Argentine Ant
  • The Cloud of Smog

02Adaptations

The "Adventure of Two Spouses" was loosely adapted into the "Renzo and Luciana" act of Boccaccio '70; the "Adventure of a Soldier" appears as one part of Of Wayward Love, a film by Nino Manfredi.

Watch videos about Difficult LovesExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Difficult Loves”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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