11/4/2023 0 Comments Invisible cities argiaA work of fiction without a storyline, similar to a map of an endless land where exists hidden, intricate connections. It’s a novel without a precise order and a univocal meaning. Like The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), Invisible Cities is an example of combinatory literature. Yet the reading is not easy and carefully driven. There are also eleven thematic rubrics (five cities per each) that follow a mathematical pattern throughout the text. The novel consists of nine sections, with a perfect alternation of narrative frame and Polo’s accounts. An endless journeyĪt the beginning of Invisible Cities, the reader finds a well-organized index with an almost arithmetic structure. They are “a combination of many things: memory, desires, and signs of language.” And that’s what brings men to create, think and live in cities. Calvino’s cities – like all cities – are more than buildings and streets. 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
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