Invisible Cities
First edition
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| Author | Italo Calvino |
|---|---|
| Original title | Le città invisibili |
| Translator | William Weaver |
| Cover artist | René Magritte, The Castle in the Pyrenees, 1959 |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
| Publisher | Giulio Einaudi |
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Publication date
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1972 |
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Published in English
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1974 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 165 pp (first English edition) |
| ISBN | (first English edition) |
| OCLC | 914835 |
| 853/.9/14 | |
| LC Class | PZ3.C13956 In PQ4809.A45 |
Invisible Cities (Italian: Le città invisibili) is a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino. It was published in Italy in 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore.
The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer, Marco Polo. The book is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo to prove the expanse of Khan's empire, but which are all actually just descriptions of one city, Venice. Short dialogues between the two characters are interspersed every five to ten cities and are used to discuss various ideas presented by the cities on a wide range of topics including linguistics and human nature. The interludes between Khan and Polo are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories.
The Travels of Marco Polo, Polo's travel diary depicting his purported journey across Asia and in Yuan Dynasty (Mongol Empire) China, written in the 13th century, shares with Invisible Cities the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities Polo claimed to have visited, accompanied by descriptions of the city's inhabitants, notable imports and exports, and whatever interesting tales Polo had heard about the region.
Over the nine chapters, Marco describes a total of fifty-five cities, all women's names. The cities are divided into eleven thematic groups of five each:
He moves back and forth between the groups, while moving down the list, in a rigorous mathematical structure. The table below lists the cities in order of appearance, along with the group they belong to:
In each of the nine chapters, there is an opening section and a closing section, narrating dialogues between the Khan and Marco. The descriptions of the cities lie between these two sections.
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Wikipedia