"I love Stevenson because he can fly," Italo Calvino once said of Robert Louis Stevenson, the prolific writer and teacher. At the age of 30, on a rainy summer in his native Scottish Highlands, he imagined the plot of Treasure Island as he played map-painting with his stepson Lloyd Osborne. Although the work was originally serialized under the pseudonym "Captain George North" in the youth magazine Lad from October 1881 to January 1882, it did not appear in book form until a year later.

Groundbreaking and fluid, and strongly influenced by writers Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Daniel Defoe, the novel reveals its protagonist's journey to maturity. In it, a mysterious sailor hides in the Admiral Bembo Hotel, and from the moment a young Jim Hawkins picks up a map to a deserted island with tons of stolen gold, everything will be turned upside down. Same. Jim, the Doctor, and the captain head to Hispaniola; they soon discover that the crew is made up of villains and thieves, who also covet treasures.