Invisible Cities: A Voyage to Unknown Lands

Francois de Nome - The Fall of Atlantis (via Wikimedia Commons)

Imagination both encircles and transcends the world. This is brought vividly to life in Italo Calvino’s dreamlike novel Invisible Cities. The novel, perhaps best considered as a prose poem, consists of a series of dialogues between Kublai Khan, the 13th-century Mongolian emperor, and the young Venetian explorer, Marco Polo.

Each time Polo returns from his travels, Khan invites him to describe the cities he has visited. He captures their elusive qualities and distils their essence in a marvellous sequence of allusive vignettes.

Each of the cities bears a woman's name. Each is radically different from those described before. And each exists only in Polo’s imagination.

Khan asks why he never talks about Venice, the city of his birth. Polo responds, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” Polo tells him that cities are made of desires and fears. Things which are visible. And things which are invisible. By imagining cities of the real and the unreal, he ultimately provides Khan with an image of Venice.

The cities are categorised in eleven groups: Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, Cities and Signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities and Eyes, Cities and Names, Cities and the Dead, Cities and the Sky, Continuous Cities, and Hidden Cities.

Reality is fabulous, fables are true

The cities correspond to psychological states and alternative realities. To what has been. And what might be.

For Kublai Khan the world is a place of expanding possibilities. Polo feeds his imagination with his extraordinary tales. But for Polo, whose restless travels have taken him far and wide, the world offers a parable about both the limits and possibilities of human experience.

Cities turn inwards. Dreams of splendour fade into memories. Order is replaced by disorder.

But, “There runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”

Cities such as Chloe, where all people are strangers. Euphemia, where merchants from seven nations gather to trade memories at every solstice and equinox. The tormented city of Clarice, going through endless cycles of decay and new burgeonings. Or Thekla, where construction never stops in case the city crumbles, taking its inhabitants with it.

Polo concludes on a cautionary note:

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Imagination is the beginning of creation

Poet and visionary William Blake once said, “What is now proved was once only imagined.” Invisible Cities is a reminder of the limitations of knowledge. Of the gap between what we know and what we think we know. 

But the glittering prose also provides us with the opportunity to transcend our human limitations. To break free from our shackles. Imagine our desires. And create new worlds.

Calvino invites us to build our own invisible cities.