Introducing Invisible Cities
<h4 style="text-align: center;">“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”</h4>
The word “tourism” descends from the Old English turian, which itself is partly derived from the Old French torner and the Latin tornō, and so on and so forth until we discover the Ancient Greek root τόρνος, a tool used to draw a circle. And here we see the true nature of tourism: the idea that no matter how far we travel, we always come home. What Italo Calvino suggests, in his marvelous short novel, Invisible Cities, however, is that perhaps “home” is within us, and we always live there despite where we may be physically.
Invisible Cities, an imaginative retelling of the travels of 13th century Italian merchant Marco Polo, is, at its core, an investigation into humanity’s connection with the spaces we occupy and the people with whom we occupy it. Calvino illuminates the symbiotic relationship that is at the core of every human settlement: what we give to our cities, and what they take in return often work in conjunction, fitting together like puzzle pieces to create the whole of what characterizes human society. The novel is comprised of nine parts. Each part comprises descriptions of cities that fall into several categories, such as “Cities &amp; Signs,” “Cities &amp; The Dead,” “Thin Cities,” or “Cities &amp; Eyes.” By means of an ongoing conversation between Marco Polo and his interlocutor, the great (and also historical) figure, Kublai Khan, the Venetian traveler describes the cities he has visited to the conqueror, who wants to know what constitutes his ever-growing kingdom. The Khan hopes that his conversations with Marco Polo will enlighten him about the territories he claims now to own. The conversations between the Khan and Polo are the novel’s literary touchstones, recurring at the beginning and end of each nine parts, marking some advancement of the two character’s understandings of themselves and the world. The dialogues are also physical touchstones, as they always take place in the same garden, with little sense of the passage of time between instances. Marco Polo and Kublai Khan travel with their imaginations, just as we readers must do. There is a sense of kinship in Invisible Cities between reader and narrator that extends beyond the typical modes of narrative voice and good humor; when we close the book at each chapter’s end and return from our imaginative tourism of these ancient, and, in crucial ways imagined cities, so too do Kublai Khan and Marco Polo continually return to the garden where they sit, having traveled, as Jamiroquai would have put it, without moving. 
The magic of Calvino’s artistry takes hold of the reader subtly in this novel. We begin our journey into the narrative, primed to believe we might be getting a survey of foreign lands, told in Calvino’s signature inventive style. Yet somewhere along the way we start to absorb the depth and poetry of each city, its uniqueness, and its artificial but somehow true memory. In Zobeide, where men who all dream of the same woman come to search for her down the familiar alleyways, we readers might understand that congregations of people are very rarely formed by chance, and that cities often have a unifying undercurrent that homogenizes all the people that live there. Or in Eutropia, the city of a thousand cities in which every citizen moves to the adjacent settlement when they feel their lives are becoming stale or repetitive, Calvino discreetly tells us that a new place cannot baptize us into new lives: our problems belong to us, not our locations. We take a tour through fifty-five cities in this fashion, constantly circling between somewhere new and the ever-present garden, yet the real tourism happens inwardly, a closed cycle that repeats in each city, in which we take in a foreign landscape only to realize that we are taking it in through the filter of the self, constantly cycling between newness and the self: “You take delight not in a city&#8217;s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
The title of the book is Invisible Cities, yet what makes these cities so? Are they so far from us, so distant in time or history that they’re simply beyond sight? Or perhaps all cities are like the ones Marco Polo describes—invisible in crucial ways, multiform, shape-shifting, and elusive, and that in our lives we may have been operating without a fundamental understanding that Calvino helps us to recognize: we don’t merely live in our chosen cities, our cities live in us. 
-Abby Edgecumbe