Invisible cities made Visible

City of Zobeide 

From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein.They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen
from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her.After the dream they set out in
search of that city; they never found it. but they found one another; they decided
to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each
followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's
trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.
This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to
be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again.



City of Tamara

Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along
streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things
but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer's
house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales, the grocer's.
Statues and shields depict lions, dolphins, towers, stars: a sign that something--
who knows what?--has as its sign a lion or a dolphin or a tower or a star. Other
signals warn of what is forbidden in a given place (to enter the alley with
wagons, to urinate behind the kiosk, to fish with your pole from the bridge) and
what is allowed (watering zebras, playing bowls, burning relatives' corpses).

City of Esmeralda 

In Esmeralda, city of water, a network of canals and a network of streets span and
intersect each other. To go from one place to another you have always the choice
between land and boat: and since the shortest distance between two points in
Esmeralda is not a straight line but a zigzag that ramifies in tortuous optional
routes, the ways that open to each passerby are never two, but many, and they
increase further for those who alternate a stretch by boat with one on dry land.



City of Olinda

In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find
somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin. That point does not remain there: a year later

you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a
soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier
city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses it
towards the outside.



City of Thekla

Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences,

the sackcloth screens, the scaffolding, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by saw-horses, the ladders, the trestles.If, dissatisfied with the answer, someone puts his eye to a crack in a

fence, he sees cranes pulling up other cranes, scaffolding that embraces other scaffolding, beams that prop up other beams. 'What meaning does your construction have?' he asks. 'What is the aim of a city under construction unless it is a city?
Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?'
'We will show it to you as soon as the working day is over; we cannot interrupt our work now,' they answer.
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. 'There is the blueprint,' they say.

Invisible Cities- A review

Title: Invisible Cities
Author: Italo Calvino
My first thoughts on the book; Marco Polo has a vivid imagination.
This book simply put, entices, allures and sends the reader into a road trip of his own.

Kublai Khan, the great emperor of Tartars and Marco Polo, the foreign Venetian traveler share a special bond which is fuelled by not words, but charades. The traveler gives mystical accounts of his travels through dramatic gestures, expressions, sounds, enactments and his stunning display of souvenirs. Unlike other repertoires, he succeeds in evoking all the senses of his patronage; sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.
He leaves each of his accounts or cities open to interpretations and only chooses to gently guide your thoughts to imagine the whole.

“The connections between one element of the story and another were not always obvious to the emperor; the objects could have various meanings: a quiver filled with arrows could indicate the approach of war, or an abundance of game, or else an armourer's shop; an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made.”

While he closes a few doors, he opens several others which tease the reader’s mind and leave it spinning.

The author’s style of writing at a glance appears disconnected; each city is titled and can be read with a certain level of understanding without reading the book from page one. But once you begin reading it from first principles, you realize that there exists a common thread underlying the superficial disconnect.
Each city described has an inherent quality of surreal. Most defy logic and the norm. Cities like Armilla, Octavia, Isaura etc. conjure images with excellent graphic quality in the mind.
Cities of the dead, cities of the mute, cities under eternal construction, cities without walls, floors, roofs; the list is limitless and endless.
I personally connected with cities like Esmeralda with its crisscrossing, zigzagging network of waterways and roadways. Each day a different route; each route a different destination. The imagery was synonymous with that of life itself.
The descriptions of the cities are interrupted by the little tete a tete’s between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. Together they ponder about various aspects of life and governance and raise philosophical discussions.

This book is best served with a lazy afternoon, chilled ice-tea and an open mind. Maybe a hammock.