At the end of Invisible Cities, a kind of summary is proposed. Marco Polo talks about the possibilities of an ideal city that might be flourishing somewhere in the world; not as a ready-made, totalising reality but rather as something scattered and fragmented. What matters, Polo says, is to look for this Promised Land, visited only by the imagination, not known or founded. Faced with the Venetian’s traveller arguments, Kublai Khan‘s reaction is to have the last say, leafing though his maps he highlights only "the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions", and concludes that: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us". The Emperor destroys all the hopes of a Utopia, as he perceives it has been somewhat subtracted from his horizon of certainties. Playing against the authoritative word that decrees and generalizes, Marco Polo manages to put in a relativist counter-discourse: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together."
As proposed by Marco Polo, the relations between the elements used to describe the cities, giving body to the narrative, are not exactly clear to the reader. His discourse is permeated by metaphors, causing the words and the meanings to break down in too many ideas. The reader may feel tempted to enter into this labyrinth of symbols, hoping to find a way out somewhere along the written lines. Others may try to assemble the secrete signs, as one would do with a jigsaw. It is suggested in the chess board passage that, perhaps, the best way to approach the book is with the eyes of the imagination, rather than with the rational, scrutinizing eye.
To understand, and like, Invisible Cities it is necessary to suspend logical, verisimilar accounts and try to let the curious investigation unveil the meanings. A possible way of reading the book is to bring about the opposing notions of Perfection and Hell in the context of contemporary cities. Calvino seems to point out in allegorical terms to an exhaustion of the modern scene, indicating, at the same time, a transcendence of utopic values. According to this reading it is possible to state that Invisible Cities is aligned with a broad concern that has marked the end of last century and which emerges solidly in the present one. The uneasiness with the urban condition; the perception of infernal traces and ruins in the megalopolis we live in.
As proposed by Marco Polo, the relations between the elements used to describe the cities, giving body to the narrative, are not exactly clear to the reader. His discourse is permeated by metaphors, causing the words and the meanings to break down in too many ideas. The reader may feel tempted to enter into this labyrinth of symbols, hoping to find a way out somewhere along the written lines. Others may try to assemble the secrete signs, as one would do with a jigsaw. It is suggested in the chess board passage that, perhaps, the best way to approach the book is with the eyes of the imagination, rather than with the rational, scrutinizing eye.
To understand, and like, Invisible Cities it is necessary to suspend logical, verisimilar accounts and try to let the curious investigation unveil the meanings. A possible way of reading the book is to bring about the opposing notions of Perfection and Hell in the context of contemporary cities. Calvino seems to point out in allegorical terms to an exhaustion of the modern scene, indicating, at the same time, a transcendence of utopic values. According to this reading it is possible to state that Invisible Cities is aligned with a broad concern that has marked the end of last century and which emerges solidly in the present one. The uneasiness with the urban condition; the perception of infernal traces and ruins in the megalopolis we live in.
Invisible Cities contextualise itself in a time when, contradictorily, cities start to think about themselves again; when the general wish is to reverse the decadence of urban centres and recover the roles of the cities. When the notion of multiculturalism, and the co-existence of multiple cultures becomes something essential. It is in this mood that these narratives, letting go of the preoccupation of being absolutely modern, build the scenery of cities as public spaces and cultural arenas. The city is unavoidable scenery given that it determines our daily affairs, shape our old frames of living, our turbulent present and our old fears. To be in it, or to read it in texts, which have read the city, is to elaborate solutions to the questions raised, even if they come in the form of further questions. Even if we live in menacing cities and no longer wait on the perfect city promised by progress. The job then is to distinguish when and where living hell manifests itself.
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