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 & visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvinos debt to the comic strip & the folktale. With his customary imagination & 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.