Evidently, something is happening here (like in the mythical hanging garden of Babylon), which is not hard to imagine: a melancholic emperor and an imaginary traveler strolling and speaking of impossible places places that are as plausible as the one they stand in. All this while they are sheltered by the shade of the magnolias. After all, the garden where they walk is as invisible as the cities they imagine.Īs if Marco Polo was Scheherazade and Kublai Khan the Sultan, the latter cannot stop listening to the former’s tales, that, as if words were things themselves, he builds on with metaphors and figures.

“The empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasm”, writes Calvino to sum it up. They tell of symbols and magnolias, of trees that bare incense, of floors made of quartz and of sinuous rivers that flow into a lifeless sea. The descriptions, though few, are among the most beautiful we can find in fictional narrative. This place is not mentioned too often in the book, but we cannot ignore that is there where all the alchemy happens it is there where the tales of cities become cities so real that one can pass through their doors, explore them, and even escape from them if we need to.

It is there, in that oneiric spot, where dreams spring forth as stories that become cities, and perhaps it is from there that the two dreaming characters also emerge from the earth. In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the garden from which they discuss cities is also a factory where buildings are being created.

Marco polo invisible cities