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Shop nowInvisible Cities
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Learn moreBookseller recommendation
“One of the great works of imaginative literature. Bite size descriptions of impossible places inter-cut by a smoke-hazed conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. ”
— Ben • Bookstore1Sarasota
Bookseller recommendation
“This novel deconstructs an archetypal example of the travel literature genre; specially, the 13th-century travelogue that depicts the journey of the Venetian merchant, Marco Polo. Known for his brevity and fluidity, Calvino depicts transient experiences as invisible edges between reality and fiction. Calvino employs semiotics and structuralism through language as a means of framing conversation, time, memory, culture, and human observation. Imagination and complexity form the prose-poems that high-rise over fifty fictitious cities that thematically engage perception and modernity. If you enjoy combinatory literature that makes you work to find the patterns and symbolism, this book is for you! ”
— Chelsea • Vroman's Bookstore
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” — from Invisible Cities
In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo — Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
“Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose . . . The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island.” — Jeanette Winterson
ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) attained worldwide renown as one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers. Born in Cuba, he was raised in San Remo, Italy, and later lived in Turin, Paris, Rome, and elsewhere. Among his many works are Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and other novels, as well as numerous collections of fiction, folktales, criticism, and essays. His works have been translated into dozens of languages.