"It was difficult to speak [...], owned by a sea of ​​words, enmudecíamos when we were together, we were walking silently next to each other along the path of San Giovanni. To my father's words should serve to confirm things, and as a sign of possession; for me things just were forecast interviews, not owned, granted. "

Among the works that Italo Calvino was planning, it was intended to form a series of "memory exercises". Of the eight that the author intended to write, five, written between 1962 and 1977. A landscape, a situation, a thought Calvino unleashed in the imperfect recollection of a fact or an idea gather here whose past existence is not what most interests, but its development in memory, its impact on the present. For example, the way that his father walked every day, uphill to the fields and forests of Mount San Giovanni, determined his irrepressible tendency to follow, downhill, toward the city, the way of literature. Or the domestic ritual of taking to the streets every night the garbage bag suggests ironically in La agréée poubelle, brillantísimas a series of variations on the theme of purification of the slag and decanting of memory.