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The nut, the thread, the key, the ring, the mirror, the button and the sphere are simple things that we encounter every day, but of which we often forget, because contemporary culture is more and more bewitched by the complexity of the systems and the lightness of virtual realities. This essay, countering Italo Calvino's five American Lectures, examines how "simple things" in fact often demonstrate their importance in simplicity, slowness, heaviness, singularity, in invisibility itself. But their "consistency" - this precisely should have been the sixth Lesson - lies precisely in the fact that their symbolic and real strength lies precisely in the fact that they are concrete things, which we can all touch, even when they take on a metaphorical meaning. The seven simple objects could have been accompanied by many other examples, but this book must remain above all a stimulus so that we can recover greater attention to the concreteness of things, which is not only important when they are placed in the windows of a museum of material culture, but because they are part of us. Literature and technique, art and philosophy, music and news, every day show how these "things" are the real protagonists of what the French call civilization: the Ring of the Nibelung, Pushkin's Button, and the "Brunelleschi's nut" are just a few examples of how these "things" have found a place of honor in history. And this is a book in which many stories are told, like fairy tales that introduce our things, to let us enter their world accompanied by fantasy.