Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1923-1985) was originally published in 1972 in Italian and translated into English in 1974. Calvino’s ninth novel, it received a Nebula Novel Award nomination in 1975.

According to New York Times reviewer Joseph McElroy, Calvino already had the reputation of being Italy’s “most original storyteller” for his use of fantastical and fabulist motifs to explore philosophical and scientific themes such as evolution (McElroy). Invisible Cities continues this trend by using the historic meeting between the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan and the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo as a basis for investigating the conception, experience, and evolution of cities.

At the first meeting between Polo and Khan in the 1260s, Khan asked Polo to tell him about European affairs. Another meeting occurred between the men in Khan’s summer palace at Xanadu. For more than 10 years, Khan kept Polo in his service, sending him to different parts of his empire to collect taxes and report on conditions there. While the meeting between these two historic figures was one of Calvino’s inspirations, the other was Polo’s 1298 manuscript titled The Travels of Marco Polo, in which he gave fragmentary descriptions of all the cities he visited.