Urban Library
"Invisible Cities" (Le città invisibili)
from Urban Library
13 November 2007
Italo Calvino, 1972
English translation by William Weaver, 1974
see Calvino’s cities illustrated
In this iconic lyrical fantasy, where space and time are contracted inside the human imagination, Marco Polo describes to the emperor Kublai Khan the cities of Khan’s great empire. No other work boils the city down to ideas, dreams, and urges while testing the reader on meaning, religion, and desire. Here, Polo extrapolates on Zenobia, where the houses are made of bamboo and zinc.
It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species [happy or unhappy], but rather into another two: those that through the years and changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.
Invisible Cities is a masterful take on contemporary society, interrogating the search for meaning and authenticity. Calvino covers the territory—from relativism to fundamentalism, dreams to ideology—and leaves the reader with a newfound capacity to see understand the city before him.
“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours,” says Polo.
“Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx,” replies Khan.
Invisible Cities is a place to start and ought to be inside every city planner’s back pocket. — NRP
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