Invisible Cities is a collection of imaginative renderings of various cities, which also operate as meditations on things like reality, truth, language, perspective, communication, and the myriad ways we experience the world. First published in Italian in 1972, with William Weaver’s English translation appearing in 1974, Invisible Cities numbers among his later works. He published a number of works during the latter half of the twentieth century and won a number of awards including the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. However, while Isidora nurtured the traveler’s youthful desires and dreams, he arrives to it as old man and can only contemplate desire as a distant memory.Italo Calvino was an Italian writer associated with both neorealism and postmodernism.
Isidora is the definition of progress, with its cutting-edge inventions such as “perfect telescopes and violins,” and it is also an abundant, luxurious place, filled with a surplus of attractive women (7). The city of Isidora corresponds to the traveler’s dreams of a city when he was riding “a long time through wild regions” (7). However, a visitor who arrives on a particular September evening will feel envy towards others who believe that they have experienced an evening identical to this and thought they were happy. These will be “familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities” (6). The narrator describes the city of Diomira’s wonders, such as silver domes, bronze statues, and lead-paved streets. However, disenchanted with his colonial project and the “sense of emptiness” that arises from conquering lands without understanding them, Polo’s accounts awaken his curiosity and the sense that something worthwhile can be salvaged from the wreckage of empire (5). Kublai Khan the Tartar emperor does not fully believe the Venetian explorer Marco Polo’s account of the cities he has visited.
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