Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities (1972)

“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 elderly 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, many of which can be read as parables or meditations on culture, language, time, memory, death, or the general nature of human experience. Short dialogues between Kublai and Polo are interspersed every five to ten cities discussing these topics. These interludes between the two characters are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories. In one key exchange in the middle of the book, Kublai prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has never mentioned directly—his hometown. Polo’s response: ‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.’ Invisible Cities deconstructs an archetypal example of the travel literature genre, The Travels of Marco Polo, which depicts the journey of the famed Venetian merchant across Asia and in Yuan China (Mongol Empire). The original 13th-century travelogue shares with Calvino’s novel the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities Polo claimed to have visited, along with 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. …”
Wikipedia
Illustrations of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
NY Times: Invisible Cities
Art Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
amazon

The Ten Percent—Chapter 5: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino