Here are all the cities ever dreamed of, strange magical invisible cities that nobody else ever saw. Marco Polo diverts the emperor with tales of cities that he has seen within the empire and Kublai Khan listens, searching for a pattern in Marco Polo's cities. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire, of his cities, of himself. In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo - Tartar emperor and Venetian explorer. Now I shall tell of the city of Zenobia, which is wonderful in this fashion: though set on dry terrain it stands on high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging sidewalks, surmounted by cone-roofed belvederes, barrels storing water, weather vanes, jutting pulleys, and fish poles, and cranes. Invisible City of Zenobia by Architect Karina Puente Thin Cities are those rather abstract and airy creations like the city of Zenobia. The cities he thus evokes are assigned to different themes such as Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, Cities and Signs, Trading Cities, Continuous Cities, Thin Cities. In Calvino's Invisible Cities, * the traveller Marco Polo tells tales of impossible cities - for example, a cobweb-city suspended over the abyss, or a microscopic city which gradually spreads out until we realize that it is made up of concentric cities which are all expanding.įor each city, after a precise description in words, Marco followed with a mute commentary, holding up his hands, palms out, or backs, or sideways, in straight or oblique movements, spasmodic or slow. And for much else our walls cannot contain, what escapes our most rigorous designs, what exists within, beneath, and above the surface of our intentions. And for our experiences, alone and together, within the walls we construct around ourselves, walls being metaphors themselves. The cities in Italo Calvino’s novel are metaphors for cities. Last week, the Peruvian architect Karina Puente sent me her brand-new drawing of the "Invisible city of Zenobia", one of the fifty-five Invisible Cities that Italo Calvino created in his novel (more a prose poem, really) of the same name.Īs she says, "I Dare! I dare because it is an experiment."
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