Italo Calvino’s cities

The city is indispensable to Calvino’s work. However, he was not satisfied with the stories of the cities he knew and lived in, Turin, Rome and Paris. Explaining the reasons why he did not write even a single page about the second city, Erdoğan said: “The reason is simple. When you come, you carry the cultural and historical burden of a legendary city on your shoulders. It is an overwhelming knowledge obtained through literature, art and history. But when a person settles there, he can solve daily problems.” “When it has to, the image changes, the city becomes anonymous, it becomes a symbol of any other modern city.” Nor did he write about New York, which he said was the city that once felt like it. his city more than any other. In one of his early stories, Marcovaldo, Calvin chooses to leave the name of the city ambiguous “to indicate that this is a ‘city’ and not ‘a’ city.”

In Marcovaldo Calvino he brings together a series of short texts written during the period 1952-63; Here we witness the evolution of an industrial city in northern Italy, probably Turin, from its early post-World War years to the 1960s. While the atmosphere reflected in the first texts of the novel refers to neorealism, the last texts describe the changes that occurred in Italian society with economic growth and refer to consumption. The loss of nature is very present in Calvino’s criticism of the industrial city in this story: “Contemporary man has lost the harmony between himself and the environment in which he lives.” Our hero, Marcovaldo, is a worker who lives in a narrow basement with his family, unable to find the nature he misses in the city, finding any trace of animal life in the grass between the sidewalks. ; His younger son, who was “born and raised in the city and has never even remotely seen a forest in his life”, confuses traffic signs and advertisements when he goes out with his siblings to look for firewood outside the city. Signs for highway with natural shapes.

Calvino’s critical position towards the industrial city in Italy and post-war developmentalism is present in both short novels. Real Estate Speculation (1956-7), a short novel about real estate speculation and land degradation caused by the nascent tourism phenomenon, is set in San Remo (although the name of the city in which he lived his adolescence is not explicitly stated): ‘Cement fire Ribera’ He captured the But the story also contemplates the transformation and disenchantment of the protagonist (Calvino’s text) from a former anti-fascist partisan and PCI activist into a real estate agent. Calvino, who was a member of the PCI and left the party in 1957, wrote another short story, The Smog Cloud (1958), denouncing air pollution in an industrial city.

Invisible Cities, an unclassifiable work, first published in 1972, a travel story? Attempt? Science fiction story? It was published as. The first complete edition in Spanish was published in a collection dedicated to this last species (Minotaur, 1974). It contains 55 short texts dedicated to many cities; They all contain women’s names; They are arranged in nine blocks, two of ten and seven of five, and include “memory”, “desires”, “signs”, “subtlety”, “exchange”, “eyes”, “name” and “dead”, “permanent cities” and ” It ends with “hidden cities”. Each text addressed to a city is one or two pages long, and according to Harold Bloom they are “original stories, more in the style of Borges or Kafka than Chekhov.” (How to Read and Why, 2006)

In the introduction to Invisible Cities, Calvino says: “I believe that what the book evokes is not only the idea of ​​a timeless city, but also develops, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, an argument about the modern city.” the author reminds us: “The important thing for my Marco Polo is to discover the hidden reasons that push people to live in cities.” This work teaches us to discover what is hidden behind the name of a city that appeals mainly to memory, desires and language: «The city should never be confused with the words that define it. But there is still a relationship between one and the other.

The plot of the story revolves around Marco Polo’s ongoing dialogues with Kublai Khan the Great, who commissioned the Venetian to describe the cities he would find as he traveled throughout his empire. In my opinion, in these dialogues we find one of the main problems of this work by Calvino: the difficulty, even impossibility, of describing or describing a city in words. In order to communicate with the Great Khan at his meetings, Polo: “He improvised the pantomimes that the ruler was supposed to perform: one city was determined by the jump of a fish that escaped from the beak of the cormorant and fell into the net, another city was determined by falling into the net. by a naked man passing by without lighting the fire, and a third by a skull clutching a hot, round pearl between its green, moldy teeth. The Great Khan deciphered the signs, but the connection between them and the places visited remained unclear. Marco Polo learns the emperor’s language but, far from communicating, lacks the words to satisfy the Khan’s wishes: “He could think of fewer words, and little by little he returned to resorting to such gestures, grimaces, glances, for city after city, of the basic news explained in precise terms.” then he continued with a silent comment (…) They remained silent and motionless most of the time in their conversations.

Marco Polo explains the cities to the Khan by arranging the objects or items he brought from them on the black and white tile floor of the palace, which reminds the emperor of a game of chess. Thereupon, the emperor no longer sends Marco Polo to tour his empire, instead he makes him play endless chess games, thus intending to get to know his empire and own it: “If every city is like a chess game, that day he will understand what it is.” laws I will eventually have my empire, but I will never know all the cities within it (…) While contemplating these important sights, Kublai reflected on the invisible order that governed the cities and the rules that their forms of government followed. it emerges and takes shape and grows rich, responds, adapts to the seasons, and dries up and falls into ruin. In the end, the emperor realizes that his claim is in vain, that all the treasures of his empire are nothing but illusory appearances. Calvino faces the gaze of the emperor, the power that desires only to own his empire, and Polo, who claims: “You do not delight in the seven or seventy-seven wonders of a city, but you benefit from its answer.” to a question. yours”.

In the preface to Invisible Cities, Calvino writes: “The crisis of the too big city is the other side of the crisis of nature. The image of the megalopolis, a continuous, monotonous city covering the world, also dominates my book. But there are so many books that prophesy disasters and apocalypses that it would be pleonastic to write another It happens and, above all, it doesn’t suit my temperament.” These images of the contemporary megalopolis are found in five stories grouped as “continuous cities”. At the same time, the author includes the end of the book. Overcrowded cities, far from nature, surrounded by walls of garbage that threaten to bury them; “Cities that expand for kilometers around a diluted urban soup on the plain, where you always feel like you’re in the same place even as you move forward”, where “you can’t tell whether you’re already in the middle” or are still outside the city. Cities that appear in nightmares, not dreams.

Faced with these cities that also contain “the hell of the living, the hell we live in every day, the hell we create by coming together,” Calvin urges us not to endure it, but to build something new and better in two ways: “The first is easy for many: accept hell and be a part of it until you stop being a part of it.The second is risky and requires constant attention and learning: to investigate and know in the midst of hell who and what is not hell, to make it permanent and make room for it.