Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is one of the strangest and most beautiful objects in twentieth-century literature. Published in Italian in 1972 and translated into English by William Weaver in 1974, it consists of 55 short prose pieces in which the explorer Marco Polo describes imaginary cities to an aging Kublai Khan. The cities are not real places; they are meditations on memory, desire, language, death, and the relationship between what we imagine and what exists. The book is 165 pages long and can be read in an afternoon, though it rewards weeks of return visits.

What Happens in Invisible Cities

The framing device is simple: Marco Polo and Kublai Khan meet in the Khan’s garden and converse. Polo describes his travels through the Khan’s empire; the Khan listens and responds. Between their conversations, Polo presents his 55 cities, each named after a woman and organized into thematic groupings – 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, Hidden Cities.

The cities do not describe real places. Valdrada is a city built on a lake whose reflection contains everything the city above contains, but reversed; its inhabitants cannot perform any action without simultaneously performing its mirror image. Zobeide is a city built by men who all had the same dream of a running woman, each came from a different direction to find her, she had vanished, and they built the city along the routes they had taken so that they might never lose her again. Isidora is a city one arrives in only in old age, when one’s desires have already passed.

Each city is a philosophical proposition, a poem, a thought experiment. Together they accumulate into something that is not quite a novel and not quite a collection of stories but a new form entirely – a meditation on what cities are for and what human beings do with the places they build.

Marco Polo and Kublai Khan

The conversations between Polo and the Khan give the book its emotional structure. The Khan is an emperor who has conquered the world but who rules it through maps and reports rather than through experience; he knows his empire better as an abstraction than as a place. Polo has traveled through that empire, but he describes it in ways that the Khan cannot always interpret – partly because Polo speaks a different language, partly because what Polo is describing may not be geography at all.

Their dialogues circle around a shared anxiety: that the empire the Khan has built is not a real place but a network of signs, and that the real city – if there is such a thing – lies always just beyond description. This anxiety is Calvino’s real subject: the gap between language and experience, between the map and the territory, between what we want to say and what we manage to say.

How to Read the Cities

Each reader will find different cities compelling, and this is by design. The book does not have a correct reading path. Some readers will be drawn to the metaphysical cities (Leonia, which generates mountains of garbage each time it reinvents itself; Thekla, which is always under construction because the citizens are afraid of what will happen when it is finished). Others will find the emotional cities more resonant (Isidora and its relationship to desire; Eudoxia and the carpet that contains the entire city’s form).

Calvino is working in the tradition of Borges – using fiction as a vehicle for philosophical argument – but his tone is warmer and more melancholy than Borges. The book loves its cities even as it sees through them. It mourns the impossibility of fully inhabiting any place, while insisting that the attempt to do so is what makes us human.

Calvino’s Prose

Each city description runs between one and three pages. Calvino’s sentences are precise, concrete, and quietly magical – they establish the rules of each impossible city with the matter-of-fact clarity of an engineer explaining a mechanism. The effect is that the fantastic seems plausible and the ordinary seems mysterious. Weaver’s translation is widely considered one of the finest in the Italian-to-English tradition.

Who This Book Is For

Readers looking for conventional narrative will not find it here. Readers willing to approach Invisible Cities as they might approach a piece of music – something to be experienced and felt rather than solved – will find it one of the most rewarding reading experiences in the Western canon. It is a book that changes what readers think literature can do.

Does Invisible Cities have a plot?

Not in the conventional sense. The framing conversation between Polo and the Khan provides a loose dramatic arc, but the book is primarily a collection of meditations organized by theme and numbered sequence. It is structure rather than plot.

Are the cities in any particular order?

Yes, but the order follows a mathematical pattern rather than a narrative one. The book is organized so that each thematic series (Memory, Desire, Signs, etc.) appears in a specific sequence. Readers can follow this order or read the cities in any order that seems right.

Is Invisible Cities a novel?

It resists the category. Calvino called it a novel; critics have called it prose poetry, a philosophical meditation, a collection of fables. What it is most accurately is something new – a form Calvino invented for purposes the novel could not serve.

What does the book mean?

Among other things: that every city is a projection of desire; that the real city always escapes description; that the Khan’s attempt to know his empire through reports is both necessary and doomed; that all of us live in invisible cities of our own construction. The book resists reduction to a single meaning, which is one of its arguments.

Is Invisible Cities a good entry point to Calvino?

It is one of two usual entry points – the other being If on a winter’s night a traveler. Invisible Cities is shorter and more immediately beautiful; the other is funnier and more playful. Both are essential.

How long does it take to read?

A first reading takes two to four hours. The book rewards repeated reading; many readers return to individual cities many times over years.

Is Kublai Khan a historical character in the book?

He is based on the historical Mongol emperor, and Marco Polo is based on the historical Venetian explorer. But Calvino uses them as philosophical figures rather than historical ones; the book is not concerned with historical accuracy.

What is the book’s relationship to architecture and urban planning?

The book has been enormously influential in both fields. Architects and urban planners have used the cities as thought experiments about what cities can and cannot be. Calvino was writing about the failure of postwar urban planning as much as about anything else; Leonia, which destroys its own past each day, is a critique of a certain kind of modernist city-making.