Cities of the Mind: Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities"

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is one of the most beautiful and unusual books I have ever read, a work that hovers between novel, prose poem, and philosophical meditation. Its frame is simple and enchanting: the explorer Marco Polo describes to the aging emperor Kublai Khan the many cities of his vast empire. But the cities Polo describes, fifty-five of them, with names like Diomira, Zaira, Octavia, Zenobia, are fantastical, impossible, dreamlike places, each a brief, jewel-like prose poem exploring some aspect of cities, memory, desire, signs, death, the sky, the hidden. Gradually we sense that all these invisible cities may be versions of a single city, perhaps Venice, perhaps the city of the mind itself. It is a book to be savoured slowly, a meditation on cities and on the imagination.

Here is what Invisible Cities taught me about cities as states of mind, about the dialogue of Polo and Khan, and about finding what is not inferno amid the inferno.

Key takeaways

• The cities are imaginative meditations, each exploring an aspect of human experience.
• Cities are states of mind, made of memory, desire, and signs as much as stone.
• Polo and Khan’s dialogue probes the relationship between description, reality, and meaning.
• All the cities may be one city, perhaps Venice, perhaps the city within.
• The final wisdom: seek and sustain what is not inferno amid the inferno.

Cities of the mind

The genius of Invisible Cities is that its fantastical cities are not really places at all, but meditations, imaginative explorations of the many dimensions of human experience, given the form of cities. Calvino groups them under themes, cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, thin cities, continuous cities, hidden cities, and each brief description illuminates some facet of how we live, remember, long, and dream. A city built entirely of pipes that gushes forth only sometimes; a city that contains all its past selves layered together; a city whose inhabitants are pursued by their own desires; these are not architecture but psychology, philosophy, poetry. Calvino shows that a city is never just stone and streets; it is made equally of the memories, desires, fears, and meanings we invest in it, that cities are, in a deep sense, states of mind. The book is an extended, delighted exploration of this truth, of the city as a mirror of the human interior.

The dialogue of Polo and Khan

Between the descriptions of the cities runs the quiet, profound dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, and it carries the book’s deepest philosophical questions. The Khan possesses a vast empire he can never fully see or know; Polo describes its cities, but their dialogue probes the gap between description and reality, between the map and the territory, between language and the world. Can Polo’s words ever truly capture the cities? Do the cities exist as he describes them, or does his describing create them? At one point Polo even suggests that perhaps the whole empire is nothing but a “zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.” Calvino uses this exchange to meditate on representation, knowledge, and meaning, on the way language both reveals and constructs the world, on the impossibility of ever fully knowing or possessing reality. It is the same deep question I met in Borges, the relationship between words, mind, and world, here rendered with exquisite lightness and melancholy.

What is not inferno

The book ends with one of the most beautiful and quietly profound passages I know, and it lifts the whole dreamlike work into a kind of ethical wisdom. The Khan, contemplating his empire, sees it tending inexorably toward an “infernal city,” toward ruin and darkness. And Polo offers his response, which I have never forgotten. The inferno of the living, he says, is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become so much a part of it that you no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance: to seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, and to make them endure, and give them space. This is, to me, one of the wisest things ever written, a quiet ethic for living in a broken world: not to deny the inferno, nor to be numbed by it, but to find, sustain, and make room for what is good and beautiful within it.

What I’m taking with me

Invisible Cities is a small, perfect, inexhaustible book, and it is one I will return to again and again. What I am taking from Calvino is the revelation of cities as states of mind, made of memory, desire, and meaning as much as stone; the haunting dialogue of Polo and Khan on language, reality, and the limits of knowing; and above all that final, luminous wisdom, to seek out and sustain, amid the inferno of the world, what is not inferno, and to give it space to endure. It is a book that enlarges the imagination and, in its quiet way, teaches how to live, with attention, with wonder, and with a stubborn devotion to the good amid the dark.

Frequently asked questions

What is Invisible Cities about?

It is Italo Calvino’s poetic novel in which the explorer Marco Polo describes fantastical, impossible cities to the emperor Kublai Khan. The cities are imaginative meditations on memory, desire, and human experience, and may all be versions of a single city.

Are the cities in the book real places?

No. They are imaginative, dreamlike inventions, each exploring some aspect of cities and human experience. They function as meditations or prose poems, and may all be reflections of one city, perhaps Venice, or of the mind itself.

What is the famous “inferno” passage at the end?

Marco Polo says the inferno is the world we already live in, and that we can either numb ourselves to it or, harder, seek out and sustain what within it is “not inferno,” giving the good and beautiful space to endure, a quiet ethic for living.

References & further reading

1. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. (1972; translated by William Weaver, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.)
2. Calvino, Italo. If on a winter’s night a traveler. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
3. Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Harvard University Press, 1988.