Invisible Cities

In all the journeys we embark on, memories of residences, cities, and lives left behind cling on to us, reaching the places we visit and blending in with the moment. Fragmented memories reform in a different time and space to create new collages. This is the perspective of Italo Calvino as he contemplates the world of the living and non-living objects through his interest in semiotics and constructivism.

Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities, 1972) consists of 11 chapters and five short texts for each chapter. Each of these short texts corresponds to a different city. Described in a fantastic style, these magical cities are duplications of different aspects of Venice dismantled and reproduced. The novel unfolds in symbols and allegories according to a mathematical system and forces the reader to solve this puzzle.

In the novel, we experience places where we cannot definitely tell where we are and where we are going, although we feel a strange familiarity that we have been there before. As we get further away from this place, we arrive again in very similar surroundings that evoke the feeling of visiting a facsimile. We witness the people who are running in circles instead of looking for new possibilities and understand that each generation builds its lives on the vicious circle of the previous generation. It is all real, and it is all a dream. We live in it, but we cannot perceive it as a whole anymore. Each city dweller is bound by his/her own perspective.

Venice, the starting point for these imaginary cities, can offer us inspiration for a civilized, humane, and tolerant way of life as an alternative to the uninhabitable and joyless cities we have formed and trapped ourselves in.

Keywords: Allegory, City, Constructivism, Deconstructivism, Duplicate, Fragmentation, Futility, Imaginary, Invisible Cities, Isolation, Italo Calvino, Kublai Khan, Loneliness, Marco Polo, Semiotics, Spatial, Symbols, Temporal, Travel, Venice.