How Italo Calvino's imagined cities map memory and desire

Italo Calvino's imagined cities as a travel book about memory and desire in Invisible Cities is a postmodern novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, published in Italy in 1972 by Einaudi.

3 articles, 1 book · about 14 min of reading and viewing

The reading path

1. Read
   Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (Book Review) · bioeconometrician.github.io · 6 min read

   In Calvino's construction, cities represent ideas, and Leonia's discarded past threatens to return: a tin can or old tire could trigger an avalanche that submerges the city in its own past and the past of neighbouring cities. A cataclysm will flatten the mountain of refuse, cancelling every trace of Leonia.

2. Read
   "Le Città Invisibili di Italo Calvino" · brunoelpis.it · 3 min read

   This piece says Calvino's search rediscovers the dreamlike qualities of the cities through psychoanalytic theory: "everything imaginable can be dreamed," and even an unexpected dream is a riddle hiding a desire or a fear. It adds that cities, like dreams, are built from desires and fears, while their discourse remains secret and their rules absurd.

3. Read
   

   Italo Calvino's imagined cities as a travel book about memory and desire in Invisible Cities · Wikipedia · 5 min read

   Invisible Cities has nine chapters and 55 fictitious cities narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as commentary on culture, language, time, memory, death, or human experience generally. Readers can follow one of eleven thematic groups instead of reading the book in chronological chapters.

4. Book
   

   Invisible Cities · Bookshop.org

   Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino makes the reader play a game with the author, finding patterns hidden in the book. Its hidden divisions let readers follow one thematic group rather than chronological chapters.

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