“Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing, like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void.”

Italo Calvino’s final, unfinished endeavour captured his effort to define the enduring virtues of literature. Originally prepared as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures for Harvard in 1985–86, these drafts explore the qualities he believed would safeguard literature’s relevance in the future: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude, and Visibility, with Constancy intended as the sixth. 

In these essays, serious reflection intertwines with playful imagination, revealing Calvino’s creative debt to comic strips and folktales. This newly fluent and supple translation offers a brilliant précis of a writer whose insights continue to resonate across the millennium he sought to address.