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'Invisible Cities' by Italo Calvino - 02.01.25 / 07.02.25

This book was nothing like I had imagined. Invisible Stories" is a compilation of descriptions of cities visited by Marco Polo on his journey to conquer the newly acquired empire of the Kublai Klan - more of a documentary than a narrative. Each place, in its magical eccentricity, is so different from the one before and the one after that imagination and creativity shine through the paper. The conversations between the two are very meaningful and interesting, with a contrast between social discrepancies, ignorance and a kind of naivety. The clash of two very different minds. I really like the wording of the narrative and how the author describes both of them - everything seems more complicated and simpler at the same time.

"In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extention of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them."

"The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the new emblem a new meaning, Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's emblems. 'On the day I know all the emblems,' he asked Marco,'shall I be able to possess m empire, at last?'
And the Venetian answered: 'Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems."

"[...] 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. What is the use, then, of all your traveling? Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; [...] the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed:"

At times, the book seems to focus more on the traveler than the city, and it emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between a visitor and a local, which I found very resonant and true to my experience, because how can you truly know a place in just a short period of time?

"But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman's voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy towards those who now belive they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time."

"But with all this, I would not be telling you the city's essence; for while the description of Anastadia awakens desires on at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastadia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. The ciry appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and content.[...] if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agnate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labour which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you belive you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave."

"Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts. [...] you leave Tamara without having discovered it."

"Zora's secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score wher enot a note can be altered or displaced.[...] The city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember:[...] So the world's most learned men are those who have memorized Zora. But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain montionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her."

"I thought: 'If Adelma is a city I am seeing in a dream, where you encounter only the dead, the dream frightens me. If Adelma is a real city, inhabited by living people, I need only continue looking at them and the resemblances will dissolve, alien faces will appear, bearing anguish. In either case it is best for me not to insist on staring at them. [...] It thought: 'You reach a moment in life when among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one finds the most suitable mask.[...] I thought: 'Perhaps Adelmais the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too am dead.' And I also thought: 'This means the beyond is not happy.'"

"A map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different coloured inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parables with their still wings, daring to gulp a mosquito, spiralling upwards, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city."

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to improve their world building, as it is the most creative and packed with different and unique places storytelling I have ever seen. However, there is where I think its flaws lie - I couldn't finish the whole thing because of the sheer number of 'chapters'.

Every time I read about a new city, it became harder and harder to remember the dozens of others - or maybe that is the point Marco Polo was trying to make in number 6, 'Memory's images, once they are fixed on words, are erased'. Perhaps it wouldn't have been so overwhelming if I had read a physical copy, which I plan to buy later, but that was my impression. I understand that every city shows us some life lesson, but sometimes the language gets a bit complicated, which made me switch from English to my native language. Still, I don't think it's an easy read, even if it's not too complicated.

"This said, it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it."