In June 1984, Italo Calvino accepted the invitation from Harvard University to give six lectures on a topic of his choice. Calvino chose as his topic (and these were the last texts he completed before his death) the literary values that must be preserved at all costs in the new millennium, the millennium we are living in now and that he did not live to see. Thus, the American lessons ultimately functioned as a kind of spiritual testament of the author and became one of his most popular works among both readers and scholars of his work, as they condense both the author's views and literary preferences and provide a concise and original perspective on the relationship between fiction and real life.