Turin has produced or sheltered an unusually large share of modern Italian writers: Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, Mario Soldati and the publisher Giulio Einaudi all worked from the city. The neighbourhood around the university and the Mole was the centre of post-war Italian intellectual life. Almost any of their books gives a useful slant on the city.