Product Description

In "Invisible Cities" Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice. As Gore Vidal wrote 'of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like "Invisible Cities", perfectly irrelevant'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5421 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10-02
• Original language: Italian
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
'The most beautiful of his books throws up ideas, allusions, and breathtaking imaginative insights on almost every page. Each time he returns from his travels, Marco Polo is invited by Kublai Khan to describe the cities he has visited...Although he makes Marco Polo summon up many cities for the Khan's imagination to feed on, Calvino is describing only one city in this book. Venice, that decaying heap of incomparable splendour, still stands as substantial evidence of man's ability to create something perfect out of chaos' Paul Bailey Times Literary Supplement

This is an infuriating and exquisite fantasy which takes outrageous liberties with maps. Marco Polo is brought before the Kublai Khan and obliged to describe 55 of the cities he has encountered on his journeys. There is the earth-hating town of Baucis where everything is raised on stilts, the spiderweb city of Octavia, the woven metropolis of Eudoxia where citizens are lost among the cloth and threads... Of course, you'll not find any of these mesmerizing places in an atlas unless it is an atlas of daydreams. These are cities far too playful and beguiling to be real. (Kirkus UK)

Observer
‘Whole chapters of unforced poetic prose in which insight and fantasy are perfectly matched…an exquisite world’

New York Review of Books
‘Invisible Cities’ is perhaps his most beautiful work…the artist seems to have made peace with the tension between man’s ideas of the many and the one’