Each city represents a thought experiment, or, as Polo tells Khan at one point, "You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."Įric Weiner is a former NPR correspondent and the author of The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World. Calvino's cities - like all cities, really - are constructed not of steel and concrete but of ideas. There's Hypatia, a city of beautiful blue lagoons but where "crabs were biting the eyes of the suicides, stones tied around their necks" Laudomia, the city of the unborn, whose inhabitants have constructed a parallel city for those yet to come Octavia, the spider-web city, whose residents live suspended over an abyss, supported by a net they know won't last long and Argia, a city with earth instead of air.Īt some point, you realize that Calvino is not talking about cities at all, not in the way we normally think of the word. These are fantastical, beguiling places, where things are never as they seem. Each short chapter describes a different city, 55 in all. They're sitting in a garden, where the Venetian explorer is regaling the Mongol ruler with tales of the cities he has seen journeying to the far reaches of Khan's vast empire.
The only characters are an aging Kublai Khan and a young-ish Marco Polo. Technically, this is a novel, a work of fiction, but one without any storyline. The places Calvino describes, though, don't exist on any map. It was, in fact, the traveler in me that first fell under its spell. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities might be labeled travelogue. How?Įric Weiner's latest book is Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.
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