Invisible Cities

I have been re-reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities while in Italy and it has been a remarkable experience. It is a very simply told book – an account of the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which Marco Polo tells of the various fantastical cities he has visited on his travels. Each city takes only or two pages to describe, but on nearly every page there is an intriguing thought or a startling idea about travel, memory, desire, the past.

One of the themes that comes out very strongly is the impossibility of knowing a city – that cities are more than simply their buildings, people and geography, but are also composed of their pasts and the relationships between their peoples. Moreover as we travel to new cities, we can only ever interpret what we see through what we have seen before, and our experiences lead therefore to an understanding not of the new and the foreign, but only of the old and familiar – ultimately our own city of origin and our very selves.