In Italo Calvino’s 1957 novel, The Baron in the Trees, the book’s main protagonist, a nobleman’s son called Cosimo, climbs into a tree in the family’s Italian garden. He clambers through the branches into the forest beyond, to live out his adventures in the canopy, running from the oaks to the olives to the beech trees in a childlike wonderland. It is both a fairytale and parable, and an elegy to arboreal paradise before we cut it down. “I don’t know if it’s true that, as you read in books, in olden days a monkey that left Rome jumping from tree to tree could reach Spain without touching the ground,” observes the book’s narrator.
在伊塔洛·卡爾維諾(Italo Calvino)1957年的小說《樹上的男爵》(The Baron in the Trees)中，書的主角，一個名叫科西莫的貴族子弟，爬上了家里意大利花園的一棵樹。他爬過樹枝進入遠處的森林，在樹冠上經(jīng)歷他的冒險，在孩子般的仙境中從橡樹到橄欖再到山毛櫸樹。這既是一個童話，也是一個寓言，是在我們砍倒它之前，對樹木天堂的挽歌。“我不知道這是不是真的，就像你在書中讀到的那樣，在古代，一只離開羅馬的猴子從一棵樹跳到另一棵樹上，不碰地面就能到達西班牙，”書中的敘述者評論道。