Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) is a modern book of wonders, stretching one man’s imagination and ours across the sky. Purporting to be a record of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which the inveterate traveller describes the many extraordinary cities he has encountered in his wanderings, it is in fact a fiction of poetic and philosophical charm that unfolds in brief descriptions of fifty-five fantastic places, from Anastasia, “a city with eccentric canals watering it and kites flying over it,” to Zenobia, which, “though set on dry terrain, stands on high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights.”
In the colloquies that interrupt Marco Polo’s catalog of urban curiosities, the Great Khan questions his interlocutor’s purpose and veracity, but he cannot stop listening to the beguiling itinerary that leads him to cities named Diomira, Dorothea, Despina, Euphenia, Eutropia, and Eusapia, each with its own peculiar defining characteristic. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, “ Marco Polo explains, “even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful and everything conceals everything else.”
Calvino’s cities, in other words, are emblems of the imagination – of memory, longing, expression, speculation, fancy. Each small scene the author draws invites us into a confluence of insight, enchantment, and intuition – a warren of streets we amble down, lost in thought but alert to marvels. To read the book is to discover an unsuspected mythology whose truths are inexplicably recognizable: it is unlike nearly every other book you will ever read. Calvino is a true master of the fabulous. He succeeds by making his readers feel they are as imaginative as he is.
About the Author
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels, most of which are imbued with an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales. He wrote: “My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.” His others books include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), Cosmicomics, a collection of short stories (1965), and the novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979).