You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.

If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.

Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond.