In Octavia, a city suspended above the ground, residents are resigned to the fact that their ropes won’t hold forever-one day, the city will crash to the ground. In the city Zobeide, men who dream of a woman escaping them arrive to construct the scene of the chase in the city, hoping to one day capture the woman in their dreams. Following Anastasia, which Marco describes in the first chapter, the cities get increasingly darker and more disturbing. This, Marco explains, makes Anastasia’s residents slaves to the city.
However, in the city Anastasia, Marco gives his first clue that he’s not just spinning beautiful tales-Anastasia is a place of desires, but a place where people can never actually partake in their desires while somehow, mysteriously, feeling content.
Cities float above water, have gates and buildings built of precious metals and gemstones, and are centers of trade and connection between people from different places. Especially given Calvino’s philosophical and political leanings-he was an avowed atheist and a lifelong communist, though not always associated with a particular party- Invisible Cities reads as much as a scathing condemnation of capitalism, greed, and the ills of the modern, urbanized world as it does a meditation on imagination and storytelling.Īt first, the vignettes of cities that Marco Polo creates seem purely magical. Instead, the novel depicts an attempt by the powerful (as represented by the emperor Kublai Khan) to understand how the modern world came to a state that, the novel suggests, is horrific, out of control, and in many cases, meaningless. Despite the beautiful passages within Invisible Cities-and despite the only two characters being from the 13th century-the world that Invisible Cities presents is neither entirely beautiful nor a historically accurate reflection of the world as it was hundreds of years ago.
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