Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1923-1985) was originally published in 1972 in Italian and translated into English in 1974. Calvino’s ninth novel, it received a Nebula Novel Award nomination in 1975.

According to New York Times reviewer Joseph McElroy, Calvino already had the reputation of being Italy’s “most original storyteller” for his use of fantastical and fabulist motifs to explore philosophical and scientific themes such as evolution (McElroy). Invisible Cities continues this trend by using the historic meeting between the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan and the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo as a basis for investigating the conception, experience, and evolution of cities.

At the first meeting between Polo and Khan in the 1260s, Khan asked Polo to tell him about European affairs. Another meeting occurred between the men in Khan’s summer palace at Xanadu. For more than 10 years, Khan kept Polo in his service, sending him to different parts of his empire to collect taxes and report on conditions there. While the meeting between these two historic figures was one of Calvino’s inspirations, the other was Polo’s 1298 manuscript titled The Travels of Marco Polo, in which he gave fragmentary descriptions of all the cities he visited.

Invisible Cities continued to influence artists and creatives long after its publication date. It was adapted into an opera by Christopher Cerrone and in 2013 was staged in Los Angeles’ Union Station. Additionally, some critics, including the Guardian newspaper’s art critic Jonathan Jones, consider Invisible Cities to be a form of travel literature about Venice, as many of Polo’s reports to Khan detail features of his native city (Jones).

This guide uses the 2010 Vintage Kindle Edition, which features the original English translation of William Weaver.

Plot Summary

Invisible Cities interweaves two narrative threads. The first is the meeting of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo at Khan’s palace. Readers immediately learn that Khan favors Polo above other ambassadors because he does not just report factually on Khan’s great empire but gives the latter a sense of what life is like in the cities. By obtaining this knowledge, Khan eases his insecurity that his claim on the lands and people he has conquered is tenuous.

The second narrative strand is Polo’s descriptions of the 55 cities he has visited. Although each city has a different female name, as his narrative progresses the reader comes to realize that they share features in common. These features include duality­—for example, one city for the living and another for the dead—and paradox, in the sense that the cities’ greatest virtues are also the origin of their decline. As the account of cities progresses, dystopian motifs emerge. Polo describes the waste that accompanies consumerism, travelers’ fatigue, and the homogenization of the landscape. While the journeys are all told in the present tense, they encompass time-travel that incorporates classical Greek and Roman deities in addition to the construction of modern metropolises like Los Angeles and New York. Polo’s descriptions of his travels are not chronological but thematic, as he classifies them under headings such as “Cities and Memory” or “Cities and Death.” At a 1983 Columbia University conference, Calvino said that Invisible Cities was “made as a polyhedron, and it has conclusions everywhere, written along all of its edges” (Elpis).

Khan interrupts the progression of Polo’s narrative to tell him that he has imagined a canal city which resembles Polo’s native Venice. Khan’s fixation on Venice remains consistent when he accuses Polo of not talking about his native city on purpose. Polo replies cryptically, stating that he has mentioned Venice in all the cities he described, but also that he fears that talking about the city will damage his memories of it. As Polo’s descriptions of the cities become increasingly decadent, Khan questions the purpose of his colonial project and the acquisition of land. He finds that it is all meaningless, given that the cities in Polo’s reports seem bent on their own destruction. Polo concludes the narrative by saying that there are citizens who are better able to withstand destructive forces and that they should be given more influence in governing the city.