Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places’. ‘was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. ‘Does your journey take place only in the past?’, he asks Polo. The Khan experiences his own empire vicariously through Polo’s accounts of his cities as he lies in a hammock in his imperial palace in Beijing. It examines how these relationships are transformed by travel (real or imagined) and the passing of time. Invisible Cities explores the relationships between memory, place, and desire.

Polo has dislocated himself from the Venetian context where he grew up, but as he travels across Persia and to the Far East, he encounters the world in relation to Venice. Polo responds, ‘every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.’ This powerful line reminds that we can (or least could before covid-19) travel the world, but the way that we experience and interpret it will always, to some extent, be shaped by the lens of our prior experiences and pre-existing beliefs. After listening for a while, the Khan asks Polo why he does not describe his home city of Venice. Polo’s descriptions of the world express a sense of wonder, they are colourful, and often fanciful. This novel imagines Polo describing to the Khan all the cities that he passed through on his journey from Venice to the Far East. This description of the historic encounter is not taken from a thirteenth century source but rather is the opening line to the novel Invisible Cities ( Le città invisibili) written by the Cuban born Italian novelist Italo Calvino in 1972.

In 1271 the young Venetian Marco Polo began a 5600 mile journey across the land and maritime routes of the ‘silk roads’, which had connected the Eastern and Western ends of Eurasia since the times of the Han and Roman Empires, to the new capital of the Great Khan in Beijing. ‘Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his’.

Invisible cities argia