A series of lectures which Italo Calvino wrote in the final year of his life. For him, the project became an obsession. He intended there to be six lectures - in fact he died before he could complete the sixth and before he could deliver any of them - but the five we do have amount to a message about the making of literature. Drawing on the works of Lucretius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Flaubert, Kundera, Perec and many more, he pinpoints the universal laws and literary values: "lightness" - the need to bear the gravity of existence lightly; "quickness" - a deftness in combining action with contemplation; "exactitude" - the need for precision and clarity in language; "visibility" - the visual imagination as an instrument for knowing the world; and "multiplicity" - the exhilirating infinitude of possibilities open to humankind.