Invisible Cities     by Italo Calvino, Translated by William Weaver Original title: Città invisibili Original language: Italian Published by Harcourt Pub. Date: 1978 Format: Paperback, 165 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.47 x 8.01 x 5.43 ISBN: 0156453800 List Price: $13.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.40 Published by Secker Pub. Date: 1975 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 170 pages List Price: £15.99 Not available for ordering Published by Minerva Pub. Date: 1992 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback Not available for ordering

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Invisible Cities is a kind of I Ching or book of wisdom and commentary for the modern age. One of Calvino’s last books, it consists of fifty-five brief chapters, each of which describes a different imaginary city. The cities are at once mysterious and vaguely allegorical, reflecting various aspects and conditions of modern urban life.


In the ‘continuous city’ of Cecilia, for example, a wanderer encounters a goatherd who despises all cities — for him they are just criminal interruptions of good pasture — hurrying his flock away from town. Years later the two men meet again, but this time the goatherd is wizened, his goats so reduced that ‘they did not even stink’. He explains that Cecilia has become inescapable as all the cities in the world have joined together across all the pasture lands in the world, forcing his goats to graze on traffic islands.


The marvelous city of Zora, on the other hand, is remote, lying ‘beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges’. The learned travel there because, forever kept unchanging, it serves as a giant mnemonic or remembering machine. Retained in the memory, its details (the fountain with the nine jets, the barber’s striped awning, the statue of the hermit and the lion) can be substituted by the details of any science or philosophy; its structure forms a giant periodic table for any branch of knowledge, whether the elements of this branch are music, dentistry or theology.


In this respect of course Zora is the antithesis of London or Tokyo or New York, where history and memory are daily ground under the earth-hammers of property developers. But then so gentle is Calvino’s touch that it can be read either as a critique of such development or as advocating it: forced to remain motionless and always the same, Zora has ‘languished, disintegrated and disappeared’ from the face of the earth.


The last of Calvino’s cities is ‘Berenice the unjust’, whose corrupt patricians at the baths ‘observe with a proprietary eye the round flesh of the bathing odalisques’ while, down in the city’s cellars, their opponents, who nourish themselves on a ‘sober but tasty cuisine’ based on grains and pulses, prepare for the reign of justice. Unfortunately, alongside their thirst for justice they are nurturing a malignant seed in their breasts: ‘the certainty and pride of being in the right’. And Calvino urges us to ‘peer deeper into this new germ of justice and discern...the mounting tendency to impose what is just through what is unjust.’ An excellent suggestion in a world beset by opposing, sometimes well-armed, self-righteous political, ethnic and religious groupings.

‘«I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,» Marco answered. «It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of elements we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.»’ p56