ABSTRACT
Writing the experience of a city often drives readers towards journeys there, much as films and paintings can inspire viewers to take a trip. The city multiplies in multicultural and refracted ways beyond the modernist novel. Take Italo Calvino’s 1972 Invisible Cities, wherein a mythic Marco Polo describes cities to the Emperor Kublai Khan at the twilight of the Mongolian Empire. The cities Marco Polo describes, at first, are ancient or medieval, though later vignettes have distinctly modern and even futuristic sci-fi features. The multiplicity of Calvino’s postmodernist structure reflects simultaneously on possible worlds, social spaces, and the ways travellers encounter, internalize, or self-reflect through them. In Invisible Cities, the first few meetings between the traveller and emperor involve communication through souvenirs and leaps, cries and gestures, bridging the language gap with spontaneous acts that become symbolic descriptions. Each city shows us an aspect of every city: the way cities construct themselves or distribute social relations or burn through history.
