In the coastline’s haze, the sailor discerns the form of a camel’s withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wine-skins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees’ jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, and half-revealed.Įach city receives its form from the desert it opposes and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts. When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind-socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.“Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. Your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its formĪs for Kublai Khan, as for all of us, the narrator tells us, However for those who work to give shape to these desires The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it.Īnastasia has concentric canals and much in it streets that captures our senses and feeds our desires. Statues and shields depict lions, dolphins, towers, stars: a sign that something-who knows what?-has as its sign a lion or a dolphin or a tower or a star. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer’s house a tankard, the tavern halberds, the barracks scales, the grocer’s. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. It is a city “that moves entirely upward.” According to others, the gods live in the buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the wells,Īnd live in all the other apparatus and construction that brings the water to the top. The city’s gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the black lake that feeds the underground streams. Ībove, Isaura, the city of a thousand wells, whose borders are determined by a subterranean lake beneath, its design by all that is needed to extract the water.Ĭonsequently two forms of religion exist in Isaura. Her progress can be found at her site here, and you can learn more about Karina and the project in this interview at Kindle. The drawings capture much from the text, but they also have a magic of their own. Karina Puente, an architect and urbanist based in Lima, Peru, who has worked on plans for the Lima of the future, has also begun illustrating each of Calvino’s 55 cities. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” And for much else our walls cannot contain, what escapes our most rigorous designs, what exists within, beneath, and above the surface of our intentions. And for our experiences, alone and together, within the walls we construct around ourselves, walls being metaphors themselves. The cities in Italo Calvino’s novel are metaphors for cities. If you want to read a book about cities, you still cant do much better than a slim, plotless work of fiction by Italo Calvino wherein the explorer Marco Polo tells the emperor Kublai Khan of what hes seen in his travels across the world. 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.
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