Marcovaldo
Marcovaldo is a very fun and inconsequential collection of short stories. I struggle to recommend it to anyone who isn't a Calvino completionist. Not because it doesn't have inherent value, but because you can tell it's a little bit less refined than the works for which Calvino is rightfully better known, such as Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler.
It's not to say that this is a bad collection. I had a lot of fun reading it and mulling over it. In a way, it's quite different than the style and subject that he became known for. His most famous works are simultaneously abstract and sharp, with a lot of glass-like ideas and passages. Conversely, this is a fairly shaggy collection.
It's filled with textural work about what it was like to live and dream in post-war Italy. There's a lot of the overtly, as opposed to implicitly, political here, as well as a grappling with parenthood and adulthood that is still mixed with Calvino's trademark magical realism. At times, this felt like something like Run, Robert, Run mashed up with Marquez.
If that's a combination that appeals to you and you've already read his more famous works, I highly encourage this. Perhaps an odd note to end on, given how inconsequential it is relative to the overall book, but Calvino writes a handful of times from the perspective of an animal—first, the inner life of a rabbit who knows he's about to die, and second, from that of a cat trying to escape the encroaching fog of urban growth.
The animal perspective shtick is almost never successful and either ends up being too saccharine or too ridiculous to engage with on an earnest level. But, as with many rules that Calvino breaks, this one works.