ABSTRACT
Dorthea, Anastasia, Despina, Fedora, Zobeide – all feminine names, all cities of desire constructed by Italo Calvino in his collection of fantasies, Invisible Cities. All but one of the descriptions (fictionally ‘transcribed’ from Marco Polo’s reminiscences of his expeditions to Kublai Khan), feature women in erotic tableaux. These cities are gendered: they structure and institutionalise sexual desire. They are texts produced by and producing a certain longing. Each of Calvino’s (or Polo’s) cities is a city of signs. In an essay entitled ‘The City as Protagonist in Balzac’, Calvino observes how the French novelist followed ‘his first intuition of the city as language, as ideology, as the conditioning factor of every thought and word and gesture’ (Calvino: 1989, 184-5). Calvino performs this intuition. The reader wanders down Calvino’s streets in the same way, at the same time, as he/she negotiates the words composing each written line.
