Roberto Calasso (born 30 May 1941 in Florence) is an Italian writer and publisher. Calasso has worked for the publishing firm of Adelphi Edizioni since its founding in 1962 and became its Chairman in 1999. His books have been translated into most European languages.
He is the author of an unnamed ongoing work reflecting on the culture of modernity which began with The Ruin of Kasch in 1983, a book admired by Italo Calvino. Dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand, it was followed in 1988 by The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, in which the tale of Cadmus and his wife Harmonia becomes a pretext for re-telling the great tales of Greek mythology and reflecting on the reception of Greek culture for a contemporary readership.
His more narrowly focused essays relating to European modernity are collected in I quarantanove gradini (The Forty-nine Steps), addressed to Pierre Klossowski and his wife; Literature and the gods (2002) (based on his Weidenfeld Lectures at Oxford, on the decline and return of pagan imagery in the art of the west), and La follia che viene dalle ninfe (The Madness that Comes from the Nymphs), a collection of related essays ranging from Plato's Phaedrus to Nabokov's Lolita.