Each miniature is rendered with improbable specificity, in bits and pieces now exotic, now mundane. One hangs in hammocks, another stands on stalks, another contains a museum of its own ideal forms, forever perfect, and another remains eternally unfinished, nothing but abandoned plumbing. One metropolis in the 1974 novel comes alive as a memory of young love another presents faces of the unhappy dead. Plenty of writers had set fictions in fantasy downtowns, but none had dreamed up so many at once. Indeed, their bulk proves part of the innovation. It’s the style of Invisible Cities, of the cities within Cities.įifty-five thumbnails, the longest a few pages, the shortest half a page, take up most of Italo Calvino’s slim text and supply its defining innovation. The style of my description, however, the parody I’m attempting-respectfully-that’s what Americans will recognize before they think of any Italian reality. ![]() The above concerns an actual place, about an hour outside Rome, a “city” insofar as it’s defined by culture and close living quarters. Around just which curb-hugging rise and turn did you finally arrive? Nothing so defines this metropolis as its precipitousness… The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”Įxcerpt From: Italo Calvino.As you head south and east, with your back to the sea, the city of Alvito draws you uphill along ever-smaller roads, tightening spirals and switchbacks that soon have you confused over what’s the approach and what the close-clustered town itself. “Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?”Īnd Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded he cannot stop he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Marco enters a city he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. The Venetian knew that when Kublai became vexed with him, the emperor wanted to follow more clearly a private train of thought so Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: “You advance always with your head turned back?” or “Is what you see always behind you?” or rather, “Does your journey take place only in the past?”Īll this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. You would do as well never moving from here.” But yours? You cross archipelagoes, tundras, mountain ranges. “My gaze it that of a man meditating, lost in thought – I admit it. “Whatever country my words may evoke around you, you will see it from such a vantage point, even if instead of the palace there is a village on pilings and the breeze carries the stench of a muddy estuary.” There is a slight breeze,” Marco Polo answered. ![]() We are seated on the steps of your palace. What is the use, then, of all your traveling?” “You return from lands equally distant and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. “The other ambassadors warn me of famines, extortions, conspiracies, or else they inform me of newly discovered turquoise mines, advantageous prices in marten furs, suggestions for supplying damascened blades. ![]() Excerpt: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
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