Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton
lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at
his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of
lightness, quickness, multiplicity, exactitude and visibility
(Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that
reveal Calvino's debt to the comic strip and the folktale. With his
customary imagination and grace, he sought to define the virtues of
the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of
the future. This collection is a brilliant precis of the work of a
great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he
addressed.