On 15 June 1767, at the family villa in Ombrosa, twelve-year-old Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò refuses to eat a plate of snails, quarrels with his father, and climbs a holm oak in the garden. He never sets foot on the ground again. What begins as a boy's act of defiance hardens into the organising principle of an entire life: Cosimo spends fifty-three years in the trees, moving through the wooded estates of the Ligurian coast, and is never once seen to touch the earth.
Narrated by his younger brother Biagio, the novel follows Cosimo from rebellious child to landowner, lover, reader and correspondent of the great minds of the age. He hunts, fights brigands, takes part in the affairs of the town below, falls in love, and writes to the philosophers of the Enlightenment — living a life fully engaged with the world while refusing, on principle, to stand in it.
The second book in Calvino's Our Ancestors trilogy, The Baron in the Trees turns a single stubborn conceit into a light, inventive meditation on independence, reason, and what it costs to keep faith with a choice made in childhood.