Que bom saber que não estamos sozinhos no mundo!

But, as Modena convincingly argues in her book, postmodern literary criticism was not the main impetus for Calvino's book, nor the most accurate lens for reading it; the contemporary crisis of cities in the late 1960s and the avant-garde visions of the city offer a more thorough and rewarding interpretation. Modena traces a lot of Calvino's actions up to the publication of the book, be it correspondences, articles, lectures; she sees how they fit into his desire to create a text that helps people envision new urban realities. Most influential, and found throughout Modena's book, were the ideas of the Roman thinker Lucretius, who informed Calvino's theory of lightness, which he later described in Six Memos for the Next Millennium