Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino (Theory of Settlements)

Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

‘From now on, I'll describe the cities to you, in your journeys you will see if they exist.’ – says the great Kublai Khan to the storyteller and adventurer from Venice, Marco Polo. For Polo describes to the Great Khan the multitudes of cities he has chanced upon in his travels. Each city more fantastic than the previous. Some real and present, others just possibilities of what the cities could have been or were at some point of time.

Marco Polo describes not the cities as we see them. We see the buildings, the parks, the avenues, bridges and walkways. Polo sees more. He sees the oddballs on the streets. He sees the pasts of the cities. He learns of the desires that shaped the cities. He hears stories of how the cities came to be. He finds the hopes for which the cities were made.

His stories are at times unbelievable. Leonia - where every day it refashions itself. Where ‘every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio.’ At other times they are amazingly true, and mirror every human aspiration and ambition - like in Perinthia, where the astronomers established the place, the date, the orientation and the streets, all according to the stars. The city being divided into twelve parts so that at any given time, the blessings of the zodiac are upon its inhabitants.

There are stories of cities that are not made of stone and mortar, but of the conversations spoken by its people. As in Melania where ‘the braggart soldier and the parasite coming from a door meet the young wastrel and the prostitute; or else the miserly father from his threshold utters his final warnings to the amorous daughter and is interrupted by the foolish servant who is taking a note to the procuress.’ As time passes, the dialogues of this play that is Melania remain the same while the actors keep changing with the soldier, the wastrel and the prostitute being replaced by the hypocrite, the confidante and the astrologer. In time, they will be replaced too.

Yet other stories are of mystical cities. Of cities that rise in the air above the clouds on stilts, approachable only by ladders. Of cities made along the paths that a beautiful woman took while being chased by its creators on a beautiful night. The creators making the city so that should the woman come again, she would not be able to run away. Of cities that have three parts - one of its dead, one that is now and one of the ones yet to come - all called by the same name.

A bigger storyteller than his fictional Marco Polo is Italo Calvino. For he has woven fantasies and realities around the places we think we ‘see’. All the fifty-five cities he describes are different. Each named as a woman and each described with a passion that only a romantic like Calvino could do for such wonderful beauties. If you have the patience to read through his tribute to his true love, he promises to change how you look at his muse – the city – differently forever.

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