Invisible Cities

Calvino organizes his 55 cities into 11 thematic categories and distributes them mathematically across 9 chapters. Why does the novel's structure matter? What would be lost if the cities were arranged randomly or alphabetically?

Marco Polo admits that every city he describes is Venice. Is this an admission of imaginative limitation or imaginative abundance? Can you only ever describe what you truly know?

In the city of Aglaura, travelers cannot see the city because it has been so thoroughly described in advance. Is Invisible Cities in danger of doing the same thing to its own cities — pre-describing them so fully that the reader can't imagine them freely?

Berenice contains nested cities of justice and injustice, each containing the seed of its opposite. What political argument is Calvino making? Does this argument lead to hopelessness or to a different kind of political engagement?

Compare Trude (a city that is every city, all difference erased) to the concept of globalization as we experience it today. What has changed since 1972? What is exactly the same?

Leonia destroys and recreates itself every morning, burying its previous day in refuse. How does this city describe consumer culture? What is the relationship between newness and waste?

Calvino uses the second person ('you arrive,' 'you recognize') throughout the city descriptions. What effect does this have on the reading experience? How does it change your relationship to the cities?

Valdrada is a city and its exact reflection, 'but there is no love between them.' Why not? What is the difference between being seen and being known?

The Khan reduces his empire to a chessboard — the ultimate map, the ultimate abstraction. Polo reads the city in the grain of the wood chess piece. What is Calvino arguing about the relationship between abstraction and particularity?

Polo tells the Khan: 'The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here.' How does this conclusion reframe every city that preceded it in the novel?

Calvino was writing in 1972, embedded in French structuralism — the intellectual world of Barthes and Saussure. How does the cities-of-signs section (Tamara, Zirma, Zoe) respond to structuralist semiotics? Does Calvino accept or challenge the idea that all reality is mediated through signs?

Zenobia is one of the 'happy cities,' but nothing about it seems obviously designed for happiness — it is built on stilts, its logic is unclear, its purpose is debated. What is Calvino's theory of urban happiness? What makes a city happy?

Adelma is a city in which every face Polo sees is the face of a dead person he knew. Is this a horror or a kind of comfort? What does it say about how the dead live on in us?

Eusapia has two cities — the living city above and its mirror city of the dead below. Over time, the underground city becomes more creative and elaborate than the one above. What does this inversion suggest about the relationship between life and art, or between the living and the dead?

Calvino gives every city a woman's name. Is this a meaningful choice? What connotations does the feminization of cities carry, and are they being reinforced or subverted?

Polo and the Khan initially communicate without language — through gestures, arranged objects, mime. What is lost when they transition to words? Does the novel itself mourn this transition?

The novel's final prescription is: 'seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.' Is this a political program? An aesthetic one? A spiritual one? What kind of action does it call for?

Eutropia solves the problem of human discontent by allowing the entire population to migrate to a new, identical city whenever they grow bored. What does this satirize? Does it describe any real social practice you recognize?

The novel has no conventional plot, no protagonist in the traditional sense, and no resolution. Yet it is widely considered one of the great novels of the 20th century. What does Invisible Cities suggest about what a novel is for?

Compare Invisible Cities to One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), which Calvino explicitly invokes as a structural model. How does the Scheherazade framework translate to Polo and the Khan? What does the storyteller risk? What does the listener risk?

Calvino describes Perinthia as a city built on perfect astronomical calculations that is nonetheless full of monsters and disease. What does this city argue about the relationship between ideal design and actual outcomes?

Ersilia's citizens string colored threads between houses to map their social relationships, then abandon the city and its web when the threads become too tangled to navigate. What does this city say about the relationship between social bonds and physical space?

Calvino writes about cities rather than towns, villages, or wilderness. Why is the city the right scale for his philosophical investigations? What can a city contain or represent that other human environments cannot?

Raissa is a city of unhappiness through which a thread of joy runs invisibly. How do you find the thread? Is this a form of hope or a form of consolation? Is there a practical difference?

This novel was written in 1972, before the internet. Re-read any three city descriptions and argue that the internet has made those cities real. Which cities does digital life most closely resemble?

Compare Calvino's treatment of memory in Cities and Memory to Proust's treatment of memory in In Search of Lost Time. Both argue that memory is the architecture of the self — but what do they disagree about?

The Khan's great atlas — his map of the empire — tells him less about the empire than Polo's stories. What does this argument say about the relative value of quantitative data versus narrative?

Why can Polo not describe Venice directly? He can describe 55 imaginary cities in precise and beautiful detail — why does the one city he knows completely elude direct description?

Calvino died the night before he was to give the Norton lectures at Harvard. He had planned six lectures called Six Memos for the Next Millennium, of which he completed five (Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity). Read the memo on Visibility and argue that Invisible Cities enacts all five completed memos. Which memo does it most fully embody?

Calvino's final advice is to find 'what is not inferno' and give it space. Apply this to your own city — real or metaphorical. What, in the city you inhabit, is not inferno? What would it mean to give it space?