The writer owes a debt to Italo Calvino, whose centenary this year invites a fresh look at how a city can be imagined. There is the visible city, built from streets and stone, and there is another city—an immaterial one—that lives in memory, desire, and symbol. This invisible city gives meaning to the material world and becomes real when read in the context of Calvino’s work, especially in Invisible Cities, where the invisible becomes relevant to the visible. The creation of this other city invites readers to see urban space not only with their eyes but with their minds.
The city’s presence is indispensable to Calvino’s oeuvre. Yet he did not settle for depicting the familiar places of his life—Turin, Rome, Paris. When contemplating why a second city remains unwritten, the reasoning is clear: carrying the cultural and historical weight of a legendary place overwhelms the novelist. While living in a city can address daily needs, the image of that city often remains fluid, anonymous, and symbolic of any modern metropolis. In one early story, Marcovaldo, the city’s name is deliberately kept vague to emphasize that this is a universal city rather than a specific one.
In Marcovaldo Calvino compiles a sequence of short pieces from 1952 to 1963, tracing the arc of an industrial northern Italian city—likely Turin—from its postwar years into the 1960s. The atmosphere in the early writings echoes neorealism, while later entries reflect the shifts of Italian society driven by economic growth and rising consumption. The sense of nature’s loss is a persistent thread as Calvino critiques the modern urban environment: contemporary life has severed the harmony between person and place. The protagonist, Marcovaldo, is a worker living in a cramped basement with his family, seeking signs of nature in the city and finding even the grass between sidewalks lacking in vitality. His younger son, born and raised in the city and unaware of forests, confuses traffic signs with natural forms while accompanying siblings on scavenger journeys outside the metropolis.
Calvino’s critique of the industrial city and postwar developmentalism appears across these short novels. Real Estate Speculation (1956–7) examines land speculation and the degradation that accompanies the early tourism boom, set in a city that resembles San Remo, though the adolescence of the narrator remains unnamed. The story tracks a transformation in its anti-fascist partisan-turned-real estate agent protagonist. Calvino, once a PCI member who left the party in 1957, also wrote The Smog Cloud (1958), a denunciation of air pollution in an industrial city.
Invisible Cities, published in 1972, defies easy classification as travelogue, fable, or science fiction. The first complete Spanish edition appeared in 1974 in a volume exploring the latter genre. It comprises 55 short pieces, each associated with a city named after a woman. Arranged in nine blocks, these pieces touch on memory, desires, signs, subtlety, exchange, eyes, naming, and mortality, with a closing section on hidden cities. Harold Bloom described these tales as original in a style closer to Borges or Kafka than to Chekhov.
In the introduction to Invisible Cities, the aim is to show that the book evokes not just a timeless city but also implicitly argues about the modern urban condition. The central task for the voyager Marco Polo is to uncover the hidden reasons that drive people to inhabit cities. The work invites readers to see behind the name of a city, where memory, longing, and language intersect to reveal how places are lived and remembered. The relationship between a city and the words that define it remains a delicate balance between meaning and image.
The plot follows Marco Polo’s dialogues with Kublai Khan, who asks for descriptions of the cities encountered across his vast empire. In these exchanges, one central challenge emerges: to describe a city in words proves nearly impossible. Polo improvises gestures and images as proxies for urban reality, from a city determined by a fish’s leap at a cormorant’s beak to others defined by silent, strange scenes. The Khan deciphers some signs, yet the connection to actual places remains elusive. Polo learns the ruler’s language but often cannot satisfy the Khan’s urges; the dialogue becomes a mosaic of signs, glances, and gestures rather than straightforward presentation.
Deliberately, Polo places the cities on a checkerboard—the palace floor resembles a chessboard—so the emperor might glimpse an empire through patterns and games. The Khan decides to stop voyaging and to play out endless chess moves instead, hoping to possess the empire by mind alone. Yet the act of looking, arranging, and interpreting reveals the limits of power. Observing, Polo notes that the boon lies not in admiring the seven or seventy-seven wonders but in understanding what the cities reveal about themselves and their people.
In the preface to Invisible Cities, a warning about oversized urban spaces appears: the megalopolis, a continuous world-city, is not the book’s dream; it simply reflects a contemporary condition. The text also gathers five stories about continuous cities, yet it refuses to fall into mere dystopian prophecy. Instead, it invites readers to imagine cities crowded with garbage walls and vast urban soup, where one struggles to tell whether they are midlife or merely at the edge of a never-ending journey. The cities that populate these pages often appear in nightmares rather than dreams.
In response to such cities, Calvino challenges readers to imagine something new and better. Two paths emerge: the first is to acknowledge hell and remain part of it until a change begins; the second is to take a risk, to learn and search within the hellish spaces for what is not hell, to persist and to carve out room for possibility.