On September 19 1985, 30 years ago today, Italo Calvino died at his home in Tuscany of a cerebral haemorrhage. Many Italians felt they had lost a literary friend; messages of condolence came from the Vatican and the President of the Republic, while Umberto Eco’s front-page obituary in the Corriere della Sera almost overshadowed news of the Mexican earthquake. In the same paper, John Updike lamented that “world literature had been deprived of its most refined and civil voice”. Reportedly, Calvino had planned to write 14 more books; he was 62.

Three decades on, the Italian fabulist still has his detractors. His books are of great formal brilliance, they say, but of negligible importance – a mere pomp of words. Calvino’s best-known work, the Fifties novel trilogy Our Ancestors, offers surrealist tales of a cloven viscount, a non-existent knight and a baron in the trees. In Italy, the trilogy is sometimes classified as an allegory for children; can this be serious literature?

The British, especially, are wary of writing that flaunts its own cleverness. Yet Our Ancestors has been interpreted as a satire on the divisions of the Cold War and a treatise in defence of freedom of speech. Like Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene, Calvino transfigured current affairs into allegory.

Italo Calvino’s letters reveal his myriad paradoxes

Calvino was conspicuous among European intellectuals for his refusal to be glum. Cosmicomics (1965), a collection of minimalist fables concerning the origin of Earth, is narrated by a one-cell organism called Qfwfq, who lives in the first protozoan and in all later forms of evolution from mollusc to man. A marvellous gallimaufry of the funny and the fabulist, the fables might have been written by Edward Lear, had he been catapulted into the space age. Calvino stole from a variety of literary sources (including Lear); Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was especially close to his heart. Indeed, Sterne foreshadowed an abiding concern of his: the adventure of writing stories, not stories that tell of adventures.

Much of Calvino’s allegorical whimsy incorporates cock-and-bull digressions on the nature of storytelling. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) is composed of 10 half-finished novels, each dizzyingly contained within another like a Chinese box. In one of these, a couple of crooks drive around Paris as they try to eject a loudly farting corpse from their car; it is a spoof of an early Jean-Luc Godard film. In many ways, however, Calvino was a curiously old-fashioned writer. His novels, essays and short stories resonate within the tradition of Italian Enlightenment, from Manzoni’s The Betrothed to Collodi’s Pinocchio, and remain readable.

During his 15-year exile in Paris (which ended in 1979), Calvino met Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Claude Simon and other French nouveaux romanciers, whose tricksy narrative devices and ratiocinations were certainly an influence. Yet Calvino differed from these humourless practitioners of the so-called “antinovel” because his literary aims had more to do with the recovery of the folk-tale than with radical innovation. A fiction without any trace of a story, Calvino always maintained, was not worth its weight in paper.

I Write Like: the website that tells you which author your style resembles

Time and again, Calvino insisted on the “educational potential” of the fable and its function as a moral exemplum. If fiction is unable to exert a direct influence on the affairs of the world, perhaps – like a folk-tale – it can serve as a “teaching device”. Not that Calvino was drawn to the folk imagination in deference to any ethnic tradition. “Who gives a damn about customs?” he wrote in 1957 to the Sicilian thriller writer Leonardo Sciascia. This was the year Calvino published his now-classic anthology Italian Folktales, Italy’s answer to the Brothers Grimm, the fruit of heroic research.

Among contemporary British novelists influenced by Calvino are David Mitchell, Tom McCarthy and Ali Smith. Salman Rushdie owes the most significant debt. His new novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, references Our Ancestors countless times, and shares something of the trilogy’s wickedly effective pastiche and sly philosophic humour. However, Calvino was not the avant-garde experimentalist that Rushdie and others have claimed him to be.

Calvino’s first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), written at the age of only 24, was born directly out of his experience as a partisan during Italy’s anti-Fascist Resistance. Ostensibly, it was influenced by Ernest Hemingway (who served as an antidote to Fascist-era rhetoric and obfuscation) and Italy’s “newsreel” school of cinematic realism, which aimed for an unpolished immediacy off the streets.

Was it possible that Calvino was himself bisected into two seemingly unrelated sides: a “realist Calvino” and a “fabulist Calvino”?

However, by the time Calvino published his next novel, The Cloven Viscount (1952), it seemed he had transformed overnight into a dazzling fabulist. (“Shazam!”, Rushdie wrote of the apparent metamorphosis. “Politically committed Calvino into Captain Italo Marvel!”) The viscount hero of the title is cut in two by a cannonball somewhere in medieval Bohemia. One half is good; the other, which delights in collective hangings, is not. In the end, they fight a duel, after which they are sewn back together by a Dr Trelawney, who is lifted from one of Calvino’s favourite authors, Robert Louis Stevenson. Was it possible that Calvino was himself bisected into two seemingly unrelated sides: a “realist Calvino” and a “fabulist Calvino”?

In reality, the two Calvinian halves were one and the same. Already in his debut novel, the writing was marked by a fabulous gothic undertow, with allusions to medieval artists such as Hieronymus Bosch and Albrecht Altdorfer. The Piedmontese novelist and poet Cesare Pavese was among the first to detect the fable-maker in Calvino – a “squirrel with a quill”, Pavese said, whose first book read like a “folk-tale from the forests”.

Before all else, Calvino was a storyteller, and at heart a moralist. Even as he wrote his fantastical sequel The Baron in the Trees (1957), about a child aristocrat who flees to the treetops in protest against his parents, Calvino was at work on short stories about the “emptiness of consumerism” in post-Mussolini industrial Italy.

These were later collected in the volume Marcovaldo (1963) and showed how deeply Calvino’s fiction was rooted in the familiar. Even the lush vegetable kingdom in The Baron in the Trees reflects the varied arboreal life of Calvino’s native Liguria in northern Italy, where his botanist father ran a tropical floricultural station.

If Calvino had been concerned merely with the cerebral manipulation of narrative patterns, his appeal would not have been so broad. Beneath the etiolated prose of his magnificent Marco Polo fantasia, Invisible Cities (1972), was a writer who had been a member of the Italian Communist Party – until 1957, when he resigned in disgust after Soviet tanks had crushed the uprising in Budapest.

Calvino’s death moved me personally. In 1983, two years before the fatal haemorrhage, I wrote to Calvino requesting an interview in Rome. To my delight, he agreed. In his flat near the Pantheon he leafed through my many pages of questions. “Troppo, troppo, too many,” he said. After three hours, Calvino’s Argentinian wife Esther “Chichita” Singer gestured me to the French windows. “Mr Thomson, do look

at our garden.” There were hundreds of bougainvilleas – a wash of pink. Ten years later, when I called on Esther, she admitted that her invitation to look at their flowers had meant that the interview was over. “Not for one moment did I think you were interested in flowers.”

In Calvino’s last complete book, Mr Palomar (1983), the eponymous hero settles to a life of cloistered seclusion and the lucid pleasures of abstract thought. With his fictional clutter of sphinxes, chimeras, knights, spaceships and viscounts both cloven and whole, Calvino was himself a strange, Palomar-like prospector in the universe of words. Thirty years on, he has lost none of his fabulous allure.

Ian Thomson is the author of a biography of Primo Levi