A “brilliant collection of essays” and travelogues by the celebrated author Italo Calvino that “change the way you see the world around you” (The Guardian, UK).

The fascination of a collection lies just as much in what it reveals as in what it conceals of the secret urge that led to its creation.

Italo Calvino’s boundless curiosity and singular mind are displayed in peak form in Collection of Sand, thelast collection of works published during his lifetime. In thirty-eight eye-opening and often surprising essays, Calvino applies his profound and graceful intellect to form a surprising meditation on the world around, both in its physical and immaterial worlds. With subjects ranging from cuneiform and antique maps to Mexican temples and Japanese gardens, Collection of Sand is an incisive and often surprising meditation on observation and knowledge, the difference between the world as we perceive it, and the world as it is.