Book review of Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination

Cities have long-fascinated thinkers and storytellers alike. In literature they have figured, amongst others, as sites of promise, beauty, immersion, temptation, despair, and decay. Take for instance Henry James’s moody depiction of a rain-soaked Venice in The Wings of the Dove where a a dismal, wintry Venice reflects the amoral values and ruthless desires of James’s characters and their pursuit of money and power. James’s vivid depiction of Venice brings to mind Italo Calvino’s poetic rendering of the city in Invisible Cities (1972). Venice has a prominent, if nebulous, place in Calvino’s chronicle — as Marco Polo says to his interlocutor Kubla Khan: ‘To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice’ (78). This famed Italian city of canals and bridges looms over all others in Calvino’s text, with its labyrinthine waterways and streets that reflect the intricacies of memory and desire. The influence of Invisible Cities is far-reaching — it has informed the fields of literature, architecture, geography, philosophy, cultural studies, and sociology, to name but a few.