Invisible Cities Assignment

Invisible Cities Assignment

Diomira – “multicolored lamps are lighted” – tranquility

Isidora – “spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells” – longing

Dorothea – “you can work from these facts until you learn everything you wish about the city in the past, present, and future” – unchanging structure

Zaira – “the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands” – continuity

Anastasia – “concentric canals watering it and kites flying over it” – fickle

Tamara – “the eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things” – innocently deceptive

Zora – “honeycomb” – progression

Despina – “a windjammer about to take off” – opulent escape

Zirma – “the city is redundant” – dull insubstantiality

Isaura – “the rock’s calcareous sky” – vertical duality

Maurilia – “old postcards show it as it used to be” – disjointed memories

Fedora – “yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe” – aspirations

Zoe – “indivisible existence” – confusion

Zenobia – “successive superimpositions” – content acceptance

Euphemia – “memory is traded” – elegant incorporation

Zobeide – “streets wound about themselves as in a skein” – elusive

Hypatia – “amorous trepidation” – unfamiliar contrasts

Armilla – “the threads of water fanning from the showers glisten” – intangible beauty

Chloe – “the streets are all strangers” – unrealized desires

Valdrada – “every face and gesture is answered, from the mirror” – unreliable reflection

Olivia – “filigree palaces with fringed cushions” – deceptive beauty

Sophronia – “death-ride with crouching motorcyclists” – fleeting excitement

Eutropia – “ambiguous miracle” – constant change

Zemrude – “encrusted at the foot of the walls” – depression

Aglaura – “punctilious regard for rules” – muteness of memory

Octavia – “spider-web city” – inevitability of death

Ersilia – “spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a forum” – connective obligations

Baucis – “long flamingo legs” – ephemeral

Leandra – “they always criticize” – discontent

Melania – “none of them keeps the same eyes and voice he had in the previous scene” – heredity

Esmeralda – “cats, thieves and illicit lovers move along higher” – a maze of intrigue

Phyllis – “your footsteps follow not what is outside the eyes, but what is within, buried, erased” – grounded

Pyrrha – “this air in which a yellowish dust flies” – regret

Adelma – “kaleidoscope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces” – despair

Eudoxia – “incomplete perspective” – mystery

Moriana – “medusa-shaped chandeliers” – Janus

Clarice – “centuries of decadence” – continuity of history

Eusapia – “novelties of the dead” – impressionistic desires

Beersheba – “moments of generous abandon” – topsy-turvey ideals

Leonia – “fortress of indestructible leftovers” – vanity

Irene – “magnet for the eyes” – perception

Argia – “another stairway is set in negative” – dank

Thekla – “sackcloth screens” – aspiration

Trude – “the same little greenish and yellow houses” – drab

Olinda – “city that grows in concentric circles” – inner depths

Laudomia – “detached from any before or after” – self-reflection

Perinthia – “reflect the harmony of the firmament” – inscrutable divinity

Procopia – “all very polite people, luckily” – crowded confusion

Raissa – “a happy city unaware of its own existence” – repression

Andria – “the inevitability of phenomena not subject to human caprice” – manifest destiny

Cecilia – “rows of identical houses” – monotony

Marozia – “transparent as a dragonfly” – fragile freedom

Penthesilea – “street of scrawny shops which fades amid patches of leprous countryside” – dissipated

Theodora – “great cemetery of the animal kingdom” – mythological

Berenice – “confined, crammed, inextricable” – seething

The narrator is Marco Polo (but perhaps a modern day one). Using Marco Polo implies a sense of connection with the past, and lends an air of mystery and wonder to this modern day account. Since some of the cities described mention modern technologies, Calvino does not hold true to the era of Marco Polo, but he does continue in the spirit of the tales – vague impressionistic images to describe a city (or part of one). Over time, Calvino seems to switch from the view of Marco Polo to being the narrator himself, perhaps to describe his thoughts on modern cities or perhaps to try and work back to his original memory of a city, recording each part as it comes to him. Throughout the work, Calvino switches from the first person view to the third, to give the reader some distance from the cities and remind them that the cities are not necessarily real, that they describe some part of a greater picture.