Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Invisible Cities, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, Perception, and Experience
Storytelling, Interpretation, and Control
Cycles and Civilization
Modernity
Summary
Analysis
Kublai Khan doesn’t believe everything that Marco Polo tells him about cities, but Kublai does listen more attentively to him than he does to anyone else. Kublai is at the point that all emperors come to where, after feeling prideful about his conquered territories, he knows he won’t be able to understand them. He feels melancholy in the evenings, even though the final troops of the enemies are falling. He discovers that his wondrous empire is actually just a corrupt ruin—and he can’t fix it. Marco’s stories, however, help Kublai to see a subtle pattern in his disintegrating empire.
Calvino begins the novel by making it clear that success like Kublai Khan has experienced isn’t actually fulfilling, which begins to suggest that Kublai’s empire is at a point where it’s beginning to decline. Indicating that there’s a pattern to Marco Polo’s stories that sheds light on this, however, encourages the reader to begin looking for patterns so that they, too, can figure out how Kublai’s empire got to this point.
Themes
Cities and Memory. 1. Diomira is a three days’ journey to the east. It has 60 silver domes, bronze statues of gods, and a golden rooster that crows from a tower. These sights are somewhat normal, but Diomira has a unique quality: when a traveler arrives on a fall evening, they’ll feel envious of people who believe they’ve experienced an evening just like this one and believe they were happy then.
While Diomira initially looks like it’s going to be a wondrous place, Marco Polo implies that this wonder will always be tainted by envy—possibly, shorthand for human nature in its entirety. This suggests that there is no true utopia or perfect place in the world.
Themes
Cities and Memory. 2. Marco Polo asserts that when a person rides through the wilderness, they’ll desire a city. Eventually, they’ll come to Isidora. In Isidora, buildings have seashell-encrusted spiral staircases and people make telescopes and violins. If a man in Isidora is hesitating between two women, a third woman will inevitably appear. This is the city of a man’s dreams, but there’s one difference between dreams and reality: he’s young in the dream version of Isidora, but in the real Isidora, he’s old. His desires are now just memories.
Again, as in Diomira, Isidora seems to be what dreams are made of—but in this case, a person can’t live their dreams until they’re too old to enjoy it. This begins to indicate that perfection exists only in people’s dreams and even in a supposedly perfect spot, it’s impossible to actually find perfection. Insisting that desires are memories also suggests that in retrospect, things look better than they are in reality.
Themes
Cities and Desire. 1. It’s possible to describe Dorothea in two different ways. First, one could say that it has four aluminum towers, seven gates with drawbridges, and nine quarters separated by canals. In Dorothea, one can find bergamot, amethysts, and sturgeon roe—and with these facts, it’s possible to learn everything about Dorothea’s past, present, and future. The camel driver who first brought Marco Polo to Dorothea described it differently. He said that he first arrived as a youth and took in the smiling women and the fluttering banners. Prior to arriving in Dorothea, he’d only known the desert. After being in Dorothea, he still looks to the desert, but he also knows that Dorothea showed him other paths.
The two different ways of describing Dorothea begin to introduce the idea that a person’s perspective, or how they choose to look at a place, influences how they interpret what they see. To someone interested in trading or architecture, the exports or the construction of the city might be most important. However, to someone interested in the personal aspects of a city and how a city makes a person feel, it’s more compelling to hear that Dorothea opened this camel driver’s eyes to the fact that there are a number of different worlds out there to experience.
Themes
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Cities and Memory. 3. Marco Polo tries to describe Zaira. Zaira’s streets are stairs and roofs are covered in zinc, but that’s not what Zaira is about—Zaira consists of relationships between measurements and past events. For example, the height of a lamppost corresponds to the distance from the ground of a hanged man’s feet, while the height of a railing corresponds to the leap of an adulterer sneaking out a window. The rips in fishnet correspond to three old men who talk about the city’s history. Memories flow in like waves and Zaira soaks it all up. As such, to describe Zaira in the present means describing all of Zaira’s past. However, Zaira doesn’t recite its past—the past is written in every object in the city.
Insisting that Zaira’s past is written in objects speaks to the way that objects can act as symbols for past events. Calvino suggests here that in order to effectively describe Zaira using the elements in it, one can’t just list those elements. Rather, a person must describe everything those elements have done and witnessed over the course of their time in Zaira. In other words, Zaira isn’t just made up of objects. Zaira is all of the things that those objects mean, and all the events that those objects were around for. Zaira is its past, not the objects themselves.
Themes
Cities and Desire. 2. Three days south is the city of Anastasia, which is composed of concentric canals. Here, a person can find excellent pheasant and, according to rumors, beautiful women who invite men to bathe with them. The true essence of Anastasia, however, is that it awakens a person’s desires and promptly stifles them. The city’s desires are different from humans’, so people can only sit with their desire. Some people argue over whether this power is malignant or benign. People who cut agate and onyx give form to others’ desires, and a visitor believes they’re enjoying Anastasia when really, they’re a slave to it.
Anastasia is the first hint that Calvino isn’t just describing fantastical cities. Instead, Anastasia reads as a critique of modern, capitalist society, which holds that people can work to achieve their goals and their dreams—but for most people, especially in the eyes of someone who, like Calvino, isn’t enamored of capitalism, capitalism doesn’t actually allow people to experience success, even if it has the ability to make people feel as though they’re making progress.
Themes
Cities and Signs. 1. Marco Polo describes walking and seeing nearly nothing but signs of other things: paw prints indicate tigers; marshes indicate water. Eventually, he comes to Tamara. In Tamara, a person doesn’t see things. Instead, they see pictures of things that mean other things, such as a picture of scales denoting the grocer’s. Statues depict lions and dolphins, signifying that something has a lion or a dolphin as its sign. Some signs offer warnings or suggestions. Statues of gods include the god’s attributes so pilgrims can pray correctly, while schools, palaces, and prisons are exactly what they look like. Vendors’ wares aren’t valuable, but connote the value of other things. A person in Tamara reads the city as if it were written, making it so a visitor doesn’t actually visit—they just record the words that Tamara uses to define herself, and it’s impossible to truly discover it.
Tamara functions as a lesson in semiotics, or the study of signs and symbols and how people know what they mean. To take the novel’s example, a paw print is a sign of a tiger because humans know that tigers make prints—otherwise, the print would just be a random shape. In other words, semiotics posits that people move through the world reading things like they read written language, even when those things themselves have nothing to do with what they signify. Calvino seems to suggest that reading, whether signs in the real world or words on the page, keeps a person from truly experiencing a place.
Themes
Cities and Memory. 4. Nobody can forget Zora, but not because it’s unusual or memorable. Instead, Zora is arranged in patterns that can’t be altered. A person who knows how Zora was made can imagine walking down the streets and passing shop fronts in a particular order. It’s impossible to forget, and some people even use Zora to remember other things, like dates or names of famous men. The most educated men have memorized Zora. Marco Polo says that he didn’t succeed in visiting Zora. Since Zora couldn’t change if it wanted to be remembered, it disappeared. Now, the earth has forgotten Zora.
In Zora, Marco Polo makes it clear that in order to survive through the ages, it’s absolutely necessary for a city to change and adapt—Zora disappeared because it never changed. This also begins to suggest that memory isn’t a particularly effective way to preserve something, as many people remembering Zora evidently wasn’t enough to keep the city alive—or even alive just in memory, since the world has now forgotten Zora.
Themes
Cities and Desire. 3. A traveler can reach Despina by ship or by camel. A camel driver will see skyscrapers, radar antennae, and belching smoke, but it will look like a ship ready to take him away from the desert. A sailor, meanwhile, will see a camel’s saddle and though he knows Despina is a city, he’ll think of it as a camel carrying wonderful foodstuffs into the desert, where there are freshwater oases and palaces filled with dancing girls. Marco Polo asserts that each city takes its form from what it opposes. Despina is a border city between two different deserts.
Through Despina, Marco Polo seems to suggest that people view things through the lens of what they don’t have, hence sailors seeing a desert while camel drivers see a ship. This becomes its own kind of cycle (in that Despina will always be described in these two opposing but related ways) and its own way of defining the city (in that Despina is either a place of ships or camels—or possibly, both).
Themes
Cities and Signs. 2. People remember specific things about Zirma, such as a blind black man shouting, a lunatic on a skyscraper, or a girl walking a puma. In reality, however, most of Zirma’s blind men are black; all skyscrapers house madmen; and there are no girls with pumas. Zirma is redundant and repeats itself so that people can remember it. Marco Polo says that he’s returning from Zirma. He remembers dirigibles flying, tattoo shops, and women sitting in hot underground trains. His companions, however, only remember one of each of those things. He suggests that memory is redundant, and that it repeats things so that cities can exist.
Zirma seems, at first, to closely resemble Zora—but unlike Zora, Zirma shows that people remember things differently depending on who they are and how they experience something. While there may be some similar threads to Marco Polo and his friends’ experiences in Zirma, they remember things differently because they’re all different people.
Themes
Thin Cities. 1. Isaura is the city of a thousand wells and supposedly exists over a deep, underground lake. Wherever people dig wells they can draw water, and it has a dark green border that follows the edge of the underground lake. Because of this, there are two forms of religion in Isaura. Some people believe that the city’s gods live in the lake. Others think that the gods live in the buckets that draw water up to pumps, windmills, and rooftop reservoirs. Isaura only moves upward.
In the thin cities, Calvino begins to look at how religion functions and how a person’s perspective influences how they think of the divine. The gods in the lake would indicate that humans will never see the gods and can only blindly trust that the water will continue to be there. Gods in the buckets, meanwhile, give people an opportunity to see those gods and choose to mimic them by striving for better, just as the gods continue to rise.
Themes
Kublai Khan sends ambassadors from all over to inspect the far reaches of his empire. They describe things in languages that Kublai doesn’t understand. When Marco Polo arrives, however, they communicate differently. He doesn’t know the language, so he expresses himself with gestures, emotional cries, animal sounds, or objects pulled from his bags and arranged like chess pieces. Marco performs and Kublai has to interpret what he means. Kublai can understand, but he’s never sure whether Marco is describing adventures of his own, someone else’s adventures, or an astrologer’s prophecy. Despite this, Kublai memorizes the signs and feels as though they turn his empire into data.
Kublai learning Marco’s signs here offers another lesson in semiotics: because the two share an understanding of emotions, animal sounds, and objects, it’s possible for Marco to communicate effectively—in other words, they both know what those things stand for. Kublai’s thought that the signs are turning his empire into data speaks to the fact that his goal is to understand and interpret, something that the novel seems to suggest he won’t be successful in doing, since he’s not always sure of what Marco is saying.
Themes
Marco eventually learns the Tartar language and his accounts become the most precise of all Kublai’s ambassadors. Even though they’re able to communicate with words, Kublai still connects everything to the gestures or objects that Marco used early on. One day, he asks if learning all the emblems will allow him to possess his empire; Marco responds that when he learns all the emblems, Kublai himself will become an emblem.
Marco Polo suggests here that learning something through stories isn’t enough to truly understand, an idea he also proposed in Zora, the city that disappeared because people only remembered it. Experience, on the other hand, may be an individual experience, but it keeps a person from becoming staid and stuck, as Marco suggests will happen to Kublai.
Themes
