Invisible Cities
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2011) |
 |
This article is written like a personal reflection or essay rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (October 2011) |
| Invisible Cities | |
|---|---|
 1st edition |
|
| Author(s) | Italo Calvino |
| Original title | Le città invisibili |
| Translator | William Weaver |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
| Genre(s) | novel |
| Publisher | Giulio Einaudi |
| Publication date | 1972 |
| Published in English |
1974 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 165 pp (first English edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-15-145290-3 (first English edition) |
| OCLC Number | 914835 |
| Dewey Decimal | 853/.9/14 |
| LC Classification | PZ3.C13956 In PQ4809.A45 |
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.
Contents |
[edit] Description
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 aging 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 cities, apparently narrated by Polo. Short dialogues between the two characters are interspersed every five to ten cities and are used to discuss various ideas presented by the cities on a wide range of topics including linguistics and human nature. The book is structured around an interlocking pattern of numbered sections, while the length of each section's title graphically outlines a continuously oscillating sine wave, or perhaps a city skyline. The interludes between Khan and Polo are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device, a story within a story, that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories.
Marco Polo and Kublai Khan do not speak the same language. When Polo is explaining the various cities, he uses objects from the city to tell the story. The implication is that that each character understands the other through their own interpretation of what they are saying. They literally are not speaking the same language, which leaves many decisions for the individual reader.
The book, because of its approach to the imaginative potentialities of cities, has been used by architects and artists to visualize how cities can be,[1] their secret folds, where the human imagination is not necessarily limited by the laws of physics or the limitations of modern urban theory. It offers an alternative approach to thinking about cities, how they are formed and how they function.
[edit] Historical background
The Travels of Marco Polo, Polo's travel diaries depicting his journeys through the Mongol Empire which were written in the 13th century, share with Invisible Cities the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities Polo visits, accompanied by descriptions of the city's inhabitants, notable imports and exports, and whatever interesting tales Polo had heard about the region.
[edit] Awards
The book was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1975.
[edit] See also
 |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Italo Calvino |
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Introductory Chapter from Invisible Cities
- Excerpts from Invisible Cities
- Review by Jeannette Winterson
- Fällt - Invisible Cities - Portraits of the world's cities painted with sound
- Italo Calvino sparks obsessions
- Erasing the Invisible Cities - essay by John Welsh, University of Virginia
- Invisible Cities Illustrated
- Fabulous Calvino by Gore Vidal in The New York Review of Books (Subscription Required)
- Calvino's Urban Allegories by Franco Ferrucci in The New York Times
- Notes on the structure and meaning of the novel by Medha Patel-Schwarz
|
||||||||||||||
