Contents. Description The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer,. The book is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor, 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 describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as parables or meditations on, or the general nature of human experience. Short dialogues between Khan 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 that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories. In one key exchange late in the book, Khan prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has never mentioned directly—.

• Italo Calvino Le Citta Invisibili

Polo's response: 'Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice.' Historical background Invisible Cities deconstructs an archetypal example of the genre, which depicts the journey of the famed Venetian merchant across Asia and in Yuan Dynasty China. 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, and whatever interesting tales Polo had heard about the region. Structure 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:. Cities & Memory. Cities & Desire. Cities & Signs. Thin Cities. Trading Cities. Cities & Eyes.

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Cities & Names. Cities & the Dead. Cities & the Sky.

Italo Calvino Le Citta Invisibili

Continuous Cities. Hidden Cities 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: Chapter No. Reed Johnson, October 19, 2013. Mark Swed, October 21, 2013. Jeffrey Marlow, October 22, 2013. Jessica Gelt, October 2, 2014. Sandra Barrera, October 24, 2014.

Julie Baumgardner, October 29, 2014., Pulitzer.org, April 14, 2014. External links.

Silvestri, Paolo, 'After-word. 'Invisible cities': which (good-bad) man? For which (good-bad) polity?' Silvestri (eds.), Good government, Governance and Human Complexity. Luigi Einaudi’s Legacy and Contemporary Society, Leo Olschki, Firenze, 2012, pp. 313-332.