![]() In Peake and Miyazaki, architecture plays a fundamental and often active role (think of Howl’s Moving Castle). I can’t help but think of suggestive architectures mentioned in other works, like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series or Hayao Miyazaki’s animes. In addition to the vivid images, however, we will be confronted with the thought that the shapes of those cities give rise to the figure of their inhabitants, who may represent various sides of human nature. Some of the portrayals are fabulous: these cities suddenly come to life in the reader’s mind thanks to Calvino’s mastery, who manages to materialize absurd cities, which have nothing of the cities we are used to observing day after day yet they appear to us almost natural, absolutely possible, and charged with a suggestiveness that no earthly city could have. It is an aesthetic and allegorical description of some fictional, mostly surreal cities. Invisible Cities is a collection of thoughts taking the form of cities or cities taking the form of thoughts. ![]() ![]() As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which “has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be,” the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating fine details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take. “Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.” So begins Italo Calvino’s compilation of fragmentary urban images. ![]()
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