INVISIBLE CITIES | ITALO CALVINO

“Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls.  You take delight not in a city’s seven wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

I’ve had such an itch to get out of Glasgow and see beyond the confines of this city for a while, (thanks Covid), and luckily, I have been able to travel to a few places recently, with precautions applied.  A breath of countryside air, a few days surrounded by tall, green trees, and fields which seem to stretch on forever, treading a different city’s terrain and hearing the noise of an unfamiliar town, really is a great reset button to a through and through city girl.

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But I picked up this book before that, during a time where the urge to escape the city was still very poignant in my heart and mind, and reading it inspired me even before physical travel was allowed, through the vehicle of words.  Calvino with his experimental but also very mathematical structure – containing nine chapters, describing fifty-five imagined cities, really contemplates ‘what makes a city, a city?’, and his conclusions? (truly echoing the big pink “PEOPLE MAKE GLASGOW” sign spotted throughout town…it is what we bring to it; life, death, the exchange of stories, culture, languages, experiences, laughter, tears, anger, joy, and sadness…

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Through conversations, interspersed every few chapters, between the legendary figure of the emperor Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, the reader is introduced to a reality that Polo is not actually describing physical cities.  His poetic meditations reveal the traversal of his own mind in these undisclosed real/imagined journeys, offering not only tourism of possible cities but tourism of his own musings, desires, and dreams.  As well as being a reflective read, which motivated me to think, look at and appreciate the city I live in with more enthusiasm and with fresh eyes, (during a time the lockdown daily walks were getting a little too familiar) this book encourages the reader to really appreciate the impressiveness and drab of all cities, the good and the bad, the big and the small, certainties and uncertainties, permanence and change – the only way to truly understand the beauty of any space, and thus also the only way to really appreciate the beauty of life itself. 

Rating 9/10.