the unbearable lightness of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
the city, memory, nostalgia, and the past hovering on the precipice of the famous novel by the most translated Italian author
Art by Karina Puente.
“Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Pegasus into a different space” Italo Calvino, “Lightness” 1988.
The city is a construct.
It is a construct that goes beyond the foundations of its skyscrapers, the high-rise apartment buildings that will sit empty for most of the year, the decades old neighborhoods that are being irrevocably changed from what they once were, the locals, commuters, the visitors and tourists, the railways that slip through the city above ground and below in tunnels, and the feet that pound into concrete and glass. These are all constructs and not a single one of these people live in the same city.
The Lincoln Park townhouse my parents lived in before I was born is not the same Lincoln Park townhouse I saw when my father took me on a drive around the city when I was a teenager. In 1986, the year my parents presumably first bought their townhouse, it would’ve been roughly 100,000, if not less, as newspapers of the time state that the cost of living was beginning to skyrocket even then. It’s laughable to think that 100,000 was too expensive, as that’s now on the lower end in 2022. Those same townhouses in Lincoln Park are now easily in the millions.
Did that Chicago my parents spent their early marriage in before their first child was born ever truly exist? Does the Chicago of 2022 truly exist at all? Will Chicago exist in the next twenty years as the housing and rent crisis continues to skyrocket and locals are further pushed out of their homes? Will my father, who’s worked in the city for nearly forty years, be further put off by the changes, and what specific changes are turning him away from the city and seeking out a retirement in the small town he grew up in? When he describes the city to me, the Chicago in his mind and memories, did that city ever exist at all? The Chicago I know is only an amalgamation of memory and selective experiences.
When I am describing cities, when I describe Atlanta, the city I now live in, I am truly describing Chicago.
“The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind” (19).
Unapologetically fabulist in an era where fabulism was eschewed for cynical realism, Italo Calvino is one of the most important and famous writers to come out of Italy in the past century. Though half of my family is Italian, with several relatives currently living in Italy, his was a name I didn’t hear of until 2012-2013, per Matt Kirkpatrick’s recommendation for further reading after taking his Introduction to Creative Writing and Style and Form courses. He’s still one of the most translated contemporary Italian writers, if not still the most. Passing away from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1985, he’s left behind a plethora of novels, short stories, essays and a collection of Italian folklore and fairytales, with just a few titles being If on a winter’s night, a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, Cosmicomics, Our Ancestors, and Six Memos for the Next Millennium. The one he’s be most famous for besides If on a winter’s night, is Invisible Cities.
Invisible Cities is a short ‘novel,’ barely more than 160 pages in my edition, structured as a non-linear conversation between Marco Polo, the Venetian writer who laid the groundwork for the travelogue and a child’s playground game, and Kublai Khan (or Setsen Khan) of the Mongol Empire of the 13th century. Following a non-linear narrative and vignettes for chapters, Khan asks Marco Polo to describe every city that he’s seen on his travels. The cities that Marco Polo describes are fantastical cities: cities where monsters live as citizens rather than people, where the dead live underground, where the water replaces the roads— all of these cities exist and don’t exist at all.
“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls” (11).
It soon becomes clear that Marco Polo is describing one city at various stages in time. He doesn’t go in chronological order whatsoever: the city itself is in and out of time. It moves along to time, and lives outside of time. While the city foundations for cities like Chicago, New York City, and Atlanta are relatively new (although the land is not, because, well…. there were millions of people here first), if you walk through downtowns of any one city you should be able to see the vestiges of its age in the architecture. Something I’ll always gush about when talking about Chicago is the architecture—which is interesting, because only six buildings remain from Old City.
The urban legend of the Great Chicago Fire is a ubiquitous one if you grew up in Illinois and especially in the Chicago suburbs like I did. It’s one of the first history lessons I have vivid memories of. The common myth is that a woman named Catherine O’Leary was milking her cow one night and accidentally kicked the lantern that would set fire to the entire city, engulfing it in flames for nearly three days, starting on October 8th, 1871.
Although the legend says it began on their southside farm, and it most certainly started there, it’s hard to say what actually caused the fire— a thief trying to steal milk, a gambler running away from a card game gone unfavorable— but one little lantern set loose on a dry fall night where strong southwestern winds struck up fire devils managed to burn down most of the city and leave ninety thousand people homeless. Three hundred people died.
Of the four buildings that managed to survive the fire, the most famous is the Water Tower on LaSalle. You’ll be able to spot it once you go further into the Loop towards the lake, because its stone work doesn’t look anything at all like the glass and steel high-rises surrounding it. Oscar Wilde thought it was hideous when he visited the city in 1882, calling it ghastly.
Yeah, it’s ugly. But we love it anyway.
The three other buildings consist of the Bellinger House and what is now the Newbery Library, and the Nixon Block, which no longer exists but used to sit on LaSalle and Monroe.
When I write about Chicago, when I describe the city, is it truly Chicago I’m describing? When I talk about Atlanta and Philadelphia, am I truly talking about them, or am I describing Chicago?
“At times even the names of inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces: but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place” (31).
Invisible Cities is about memory, displacement, time, nostalgia, and death. Memory is a non-linear trajectory as our brains are incapable of retaining every memory we’ve ever had and the further time passes, the more that memory becomes rose-colored and filtered by a desire for something simpler than was reality. Broken up into nine sections based on 11 thematic aspects about the City (Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, Cities and Signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities and Eyes, Cities and Names, Cities and the Dead, Cities and the Sky, Continuous Cities and Hidden Cities), the novel allows the reader to examine their own relationship with their beloved cities.
When you return to your favorite city, does it ever feel the same? How much time passes and how much changes? When you come back to the city, is your little hideaway gone? Is your old apartment and house still there, or has it been mutated into an Air BNB, shutting out the locals and jacking up the real estate so high no one can live there anymore? Does it sit empty because some international business mogul buys it on the off-chance of staying there for one month of the year? Is your favorite coffee shop with the couches you’d sink into and listen to a local band play the guitar and sax while you nurse a modest glass or wine or macchiato or drip of medium roast still there, or has it been burned down by an angry ex-employee or has it been torn down and replaced with minimalist glass and marble and you feel too poor to even sit at a stool? Have the little gods fled and what has replaced them? Can they be called gods at all?
“Desires are already memories” (2).
“‘Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of cities, I have already lost it, little by little” (87).
The novel breaks up these rumination into pieces in a way that would spit on the Freytag Triangle of narrative, as the novel and Marco Polo actively refuse to accept any traditional framing that would make a typical novel a novel. There is no climax, but there is tension: the tension of the conversations between Marco Polo and Khublai Khan and the tension of bittersweetness in each vignette for a female named city.
Marco Polo in the novel is speaking towards his legendary time period of the 13th century, but he’s also speaking as a man in the 70s, when the book was published. One way of examining the novel is through its rumination on time and memory, but it also has political undercurrents which I’d be loathe to overlook.
Italo Calvino’s parents were scientists, academics and Socialists in a time when fascism was on the rise in Italy. One of his most vivid memories as a child was watching a Marxist professor be violently assaulted and beaten by Mussolini’s Blackshirts, and his parents despised the totalitarian government so much that they kept their children and Italo from being educated by the Catholic Church or any religion whatsoever. He was part of the Italian Resistance and a member of the Communist party during much of World War II (though he became disillusioned with the latter during the 1956 invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union). He maintained these Communist and Socialist beliefs well into his old age. When looking at Invisible Cities through the lens of a post-World War II Italy and Calvino’s complicated feelings towards the country he was raised in, it adds a new dimension to the way Marco Polo describes these cities.
“Perinthia’s astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters” (145).
My paternal grandmother’s parents fled Italy in the 20s, if not early. I have to wonder if they first felt the stirring uneasiness by then.
Palazzo Venecia in Rome was the headquarters of the Mussolini fascist government, and there is a book by Kate Ferris, Everyday Life in Fascist Venice 1923-40 which describes how the people of Venice lived under fascist dictatorship, how the citizens resisted, escaped, and how they were complacent and supported the fascist regime. If the astronomers of Perinthia were to show the harmony of the universe through the citizens of their city, then of course Venice would be a city full of monsters—under a fascist regime, there is no boundary between the private and public and anyone can and will throw you to the starving, rabid wolves should you do anything seen out of line. You could do nothing and still be murdered or violently assaulted: how much can you trust your neighbor?
We shouldn’t have to ask this question, but here we are.
As we slip back into McCarthyism and totalitarian, fascist parties begin to show themselves in my country, we are not so separate from the past. It echoes, and the city will house it and stand still while monsters inhabit it.
“Invisible Cities articulates the view that its protagonist, Polo, has of the cities he encounters and the collectiveness they represent, resulting in a complex understanding of the many interactions that may occur in an urban space” (Lima 74).
Venice keenly remembers its fascist past with shame and quickly struck down a beach club fashioning itself on Nazi propaganda and fascism back in 2017, to the outrage of the Venetian public. The city exists out of time and it will always remember, and if it doesn’t, its people must, even as it steadily sinks further underwater.
Water and underwater, hidden cities are a motif in the novel, which is sadly a real worry for many cities in the United States.
Even if Calvino himself tried to put a distance between art and politics in Invisible Cities, whether he’s aware or not, the memory of a violent past echoes throughout these depicted fictional cities. Calvino lived through the second World War, the Cold War, and the Years of Lead, a fifteen year stretch of violent turmoil in a post-war and post-fascist Italy—it’d be naive to assume that Calvino’s political life and the politics around him didn’t inform, in some capacity, the melancholic and bittersweet tone of the book.
I’m not as interested in whether or not the novel fits into a modern or postmodern box: I’m far more invested in the themes concerning memory, nostalgia, community, placement/displacement and the political undercurrents than I am the structure, though it is worth the study. Plenty of scholars have done that ahead of me. I’ve focused primarily on the cities themselves, as they’re the most interesting feature of the novel to me, but the dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan are just as fascinating and worthy of study, which I’ll leave to Robert Ryan in “Politics, Discourse, Empire: Framed Knowledge in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.”
“‘It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear’” (135)
“What is the city today, for us? I believe that I have written something like a last love poem to the city, at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to live there” (Calvino 40).
These are words Italo Calvino presented as a lecture to the Writing Division at Columbia University on March 29, 1983. Almost forty years later, it’s all the more eerily prescient.
Invisible Cities is a novel that continues to be effortlessly timeless, and it is because of Italo Calvino’s dismissal of a strict sense of time.
The city exist within and out of time, and they will long live past us.
The city you love—does it really exist?
Bibliography:
A.V. “Italians are still haunted by the Years of Lead,” The Economist. November 27, 2017. https://www.economist.com/prospero/2017/11/27/italians-are-still-haunted-by-the-years-of-lead
“Italian uproar over fascist-themed beach near Venice” BBC. July 11 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40566547
Bendix, Aria. “8 American cities that could disappear by 2100,” Business Insider. March 17, 2020. https://www.businessinsider.com/american-cities-disappear-sea-level-rise-2100-2019-3
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Giulio Einaudi Editore. 1972. Translated by Harcourt Inc., 1974.
Calvino, Italo. “Italo Calvino on ‘Invisible Cities,’” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. No. 8. Spring/Summer 1983. 37-42.
Calvino, Italo. “Lightness,” Six Memos For the New Millennium. Vintage Books. 1988. https://zerogravity.empac.rpi.edu/lightness/
Lima, Anabel. “THE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT OF ITALO CALVINO’S INVISIBLE CITIES AS URBAN CRITICISM.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 2018, 73–74.
“The Great Chicago Fire and the ‘Great Rebuilding’” National Geographic. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/chicago-fire-1871-and-great-rebuilding
K. Piggot made me think about the town were I currently live. I think about the fight that had to happen to save some of the most important buildings with important history. I thought about how I cannot drive past the place where I grew up because it hurts too much. To see the the old house my father built with his own two hands as well as the huge old oak trees in the woods which surrounded it gone is so heartbreaking. I watched a documentary about native Americans who had lived in Death Valley for generations. They were displaced from their homes so the government could designate it a National Park. Parks are nice, but the inhabitants had no say in the matter. Shame on us! Then, I also thought about the cities in Ukraine. Bombed and forever changed. WW2 changed the world and its cities forever. History has repeated itself time and time again making us all nomads I suppose.