Despite the beautiful passages within Invisible Cities—and despite the only two characters being from the 13th century—the world that Invisible Cities presents is neither entirely beautiful nor a historically accurate reflection of the world as it was hundreds of years ago. Instead, the novel depicts an attempt by the powerful (as represented by the emperor Kublai Khan) to understand how the modern world came to a state that, the novel suggests, is horrific, out of control, and in many cases, meaningless. Especially given Calvino’s philosophical and political leanings—he was an avowed atheist and a lifelong communist, though not always associated with a particular party—Invisible Cities reads as much as a scathing condemnation of capitalism, greed, and the ills of the modern, urbanized world as it does a meditation on imagination and storytelling.
At first, the vignettes of cities that Marco Polo creates seem purely magical. Cities float above water, have gates and buildings built of precious metals and gemstones, and are centers of trade and connection between people from different places. However, in the city Anastasia, Marco gives his first clue that he’s not just spinning beautiful tales—Anastasia is a place of desires, but a place where people can never actually partake in their desires while somehow, mysteriously, feeling content. This, Marco explains, makes Anastasia’s residents slaves to the city. Following Anastasia, which Marco describes in the first chapter, the cities get increasingly darker and more disturbing. In the city Zobeide, men who dream of a woman escaping them arrive to construct the scene of the chase in the city, hoping to one day capture the woman in their dreams. In Octavia, a city suspended above the ground, residents are resigned to the fact that their ropes won’t hold forever—one day, the city will crash to the ground. By creating increasingly darker landscapes after showcasing vignettes that are beautiful and seemingly perfect, Calvino draws upon a novel he mentions by name in Marco and Kublai’s final conversation: Thomas More’s Utopia. Utopia parodies and critiques exploration and expansion in pursuit of building a utopia, something that both Utopia and Invisible Cities suggest can never actually exist. It’s telling, then, that even in Calvino’s admittedly imaginary cities, there are none that read explicitly as utopias—even the human mind, he seems to suggest, is incapable of coming up with something that’s wholly perfect.
Following the novel’s midpoint, at which point Marco Polo admits that he’s talking about his home city of Venice, Invisible Cities begins to feel increasingly modern and less obviously fantastical. At this point in the novel, Calvino begins to take issue with the trappings of the modern world, from overcrowding and the suburbs to what he suggests is the constant fight to throw off oppressive systems—presumably, capitalism, greed, and corruption. Building off of the optimism and beauty expressed in the first chapter, Marco introduces the city of Perinthia. The city was founded by people who calculated everything perfectly in order to mimic the stars and the gods—but, within a few generations, the city is populated by monsters, and the founders are left to question whether they were wrong (and the monsters are a product of human error) or whether they were right (and humanity is naturally monstrous). Other cities find themselves trapped in a cycle of freeing themselves from nasty rats, and only some succeed—only to fall back, at some point, to being overrun by rats. Perinthia is suggestive of both urban overcrowding (in it, Marco mentions that the particularly monstrous are kept in overfull closets) and the idea that overcrowding and its consequences come from the belief that humans are right to build and multiply with abandon, something that Calvino suggests may not be correct.
In Trude, Marco gets off the plane and remarks that he wouldn’t know he was in a place different from where he came from if there hadn’t been a sign—everything, from the people to the buildings, look exactly the same. Meanwhile, in Penthesilea, Marco finds that the suburbs are so extensive that he can never reach the actual city, nor can he ever leave. With these two cities in particular, Calvino seems to lament that places are losing their individuality and, in time, every place in the world will look exactly the same—something that he implies is a product of the modern, capitalist world.
In all of these horrific cities, as well as in Kublai Khan’s empire that he so desperately wants to properly control, civilization seems bloated and unwieldy—and figures like Kublai seem less and less suited to the task of saving humanity from itself. Despite the bleak outlook of many of the cities and of Kublai himself, Marco Polo’s narration nonetheless suggests that there are several things people can do to reckon with the ills of the modern world. In addition to telling Kublai to always look for the beauty in people and in places, Marco’s positive tone and his focus on the cities that are trying to break free and better themselves—even if he knows they’ll eventually be subjugated again—suggests that it’s always good to fight for a better world, no matter how bleak the current world may seem.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Modernity ThemeTracker
Modernity Quotes in Invisible Cities
It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.
Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.
Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.
It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.
He infers this: if existence in all its moments is all of itself, Zoe is the place of indivisible existence. But why, then, does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves?
[...] and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something of the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape.
The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.
Even when lovers twist their naked bodies, skin against skin, seeking the position that will give one the most pleasure in the other, even when murderers plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck and more clotted blood pours out the more they press the blade that slips between the tendons, it is not so much their copulating or murdering that matters as the copulating or murdering of the images, limpid and cold in the mirror.
For everyone, sooner or later, the day comes when we bring our gaze down along the drainpipes and we can no longer detach it from the cobblestones. The reverse is not impossible, but it is more rare: and so we continue walking through Zemrude’s streets with eyes now digging into the cellars, the foundations, the wells.
For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet’s harmonious pattern was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.
It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia’s opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.
And Polo answers, “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.”
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
