![]() The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. Y on March 31st, 1983- it begins at 8:40 where Calvino reads from a section of Invisible Cities called “Thin Cities.” In this excerpt, Polo tells Khan of a place called “Armilla”: But if you’d rather skip ahead to the English portion of his reading-recorded at the 92nd St. I find it very pleasing to listen to, even if I do not understand it all. Palomar, a work of “even more archness and architectural invention.” Do not be daunted by Calvino’s Italian. Similar observations can be made of any of the author’s oddly enchanting allegorical fictions- Seamus Heaney called Calvino’s stories “fantastic displays” inspired by “symmetries and arithmetics.” In the audio above, you can hear the author read selections from several of his works, including Invisible Cities and Mr. Each city represents a thought experiment.” Calvino’s cities-like all cities, really-are constructed not of steel and concrete but of ideas. “At some point,” says author Eric Weiner, “you realize that Calvino is not talking about cities at all, not in the way we normally think of the word. In Calvino’s novel-more a collection of prose-poems-Polo regales Khan with his accounts of 55 exotic cities, while the busy emperor’s functionaries come and go. (Listen to the Chronicles of Narnia in a free audio format here).įor grown-up readers, no author better evokes the uncanny geopolitics of the medieval imagination than Italo Calvino, whose Invisible Cities imagines Polo’s supposed journey to the imperial seat of Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. These tales of strange and unknown lands were, after all, prominent inspiration for C.S. Medieval travelogues like Polo’s open up the possibility of fairy kingdoms with outlandish customs thriving almost within reach. As readers, we get lost in these fascinating romances because the worlds they describe are both so strange yet so unsettlingly familiar. After all, the Italian title of Polo’s travelogue- Il Milione-may refer to Polo’s reputation as the teller of “a million” lies.īut let us leave the puzzles of authenticity to historians. While the appearance of monsters and marvels seems capricious to the modern reader, these elements may have felt almost mundane to Polo’s contemporaries. Like other travel narratives of the period (notably the spurious Travels of Sir John Mandeville), Polo’s stories mixed accurate geographical and cultural information with folklore, myth, and Orientalist misapprehension. ![]() ![]() ![]() It is an innovative story that has been profoundly influential in literary, architectural and many other creative fields, and consequently Invisible Cities is considered a remarkable and masterful book.The Travels of Marco Polo-tales told by the Venetian explorer to Italian romance writer Rustichello da Pisa-purportedly describes in great detail Polo’s encounter with “The East,” a place in the medieval European mind as alien and fantastical as the interstellar realms of science fiction. Invisible Cities gives way to a collection of bizarre, beautiful, horrible and terrifying cities - although at times strangely familiar and other times terrifically impossible. These various encounters, the constructions of imagined cities, are filled with persuasive imagery, rich in architectural form and offer suggestive in cultural and social metaphors as a comment on the nature of our perceptions and rituals. Unbeknown to Khan, Polo is describing, over and over again, the myriad of invented forms of Venice - the very city they both dwell in. Italo Calvino uses sublime prose to evoke the extraordinary and yet illusory endeavours of a young Marco Polo, who describes to the Kublai Khan, the exotic and global encounters he pretends to have witnessed. Victoria writes: Invisible Cities is a brilliant novel about the dominance of imagination, the lust of desire, the power of the Other and the evocative nature of 'story'. ![]()
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