Invisible Cities

Imagining different cities from different viewpoints in history is the focus of Calvino’s wonderful set of vignettes between Marco Polo from his 13th-century travelogue and Kublai Kahn as they explore different ways they see cities that lie along the Silk Road. Weaving fact into fiction, they point up the essential logic of how cities are formed and how they evolve. What we remember, how we perceive these memories, and the size and shape of cities are all ideas which is the canvas on which Calvino describes the many cities of our imagination.

This is a wonderful set of stories–you can… show more.

Marco Polo at the court of Kublai Kahn tells of the fantastical cities that he has seen on his journey. 

Each city, told in a vignette of a page or two, each more amazing than the last is another reflection on the universal city – the way humans come together to build something larger than themselves. And through these views, one comes to see how we construct societies and the bonds that hold us together.

A masterwork of poetry and vision.

Invisible Cities is a surreal fantasy classic that blurs reality by describing it with poetic specificity. Marco Polo and Genghis Khan hold a number of conversations in the Khan’s beautiful garden and Polo regales the great conqueror with descriptions of the various cities Polo has visited. Are any of these cities real? Does it matter? Each one is weird and cool and seems to allude to dreamy truths about existence. Every time I teach a fiction workshop, this is on the syllabus. Each city is a mini-exercise in world building.    

Invisible Cities, all by itself, blew the walls off my notions of what a novel could be. Picture it: Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, likely stoned, certainly world-weary, kicked back on cushions in the Great Khan’s palace. That’s it. They talk. And yet the book overflows with movement and discovery. Polo speaks of the cities he’s visited; Khan describes those he dreams his empire might contain. As the night progresses, the cities pass from odd to eerie to utterly fantastical: cities built like spiderwebs over canyons, cities enslaved by the very accuracy of their astrologers, cities whose people all… show more.

Invisible Cities was first published in Italian in 1972 and is a classic work of fiction. The setting is a set of conversations between the Venetian merchant Marco Polo and the Mongol Emperor of China, Kublai Khan. Polo describe strange and wonderful cities he has visited on his travels (or has he? Because so many of the cities are bizarre, unreal and compelling). Each short description is like a poem, and together they raise questions of memory and perspective, of the power of our preconceptions to shape what we see, and the power of words to capture the essence of… show more.