Kublai Khan himself notices that “Marco Polo’s cities resembled one another as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements”. Some cities are similar, others seem real ( are they all a version of Venice? readers wonder) while others are dreamlike. And then there’s Laudomia, the city of the unborn, Argia, a city with earth instead of air, and Procopia, a city so crowded that the people hide the place and even the sky. While in Cecilia “the places have mingled”, Irene is “a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes”. Calvino’s cities are shapeless, contradictory, beguiling, discontinuous, ambiguous and fragmented within themselves. Though the places in Invisible Cities are imaginary, as a reader “ you will constantly find yourself picturing the streets of your own city or cities you have visited.” Fifty-five invisible citiesįifty-five invisible cities, all bearing women’s names.

And Polo’s tales of cities, fifty-five in all. A narrative frame, written in italics and portraying the dialogues between the two protagonists.

In Italo Calvino’s novel, the young Venetian traveler Marco Polo describes the cities he has seen in his travels to the melancholy emperor Kublai Khan. Published in 1972, Invisible Citiescollects poetic tales on the city in general. “What is the city today for us? I believe that I have written something like a last love poem addressed to the city, at a time when it’s becoming increasingly difficult to live there.” Italo Calvino, 1983

Invisible cities book