Extract

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

Fifty-five cities shimmer into being between the words of an emperor and a traveler, each one impossible, each one more real than stone. Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan an atlas of desire: cities suspended from spider webs, cities where the dead live beneath the living, cities that exist only in the act of departure. Italo Calvino composed this crystalline novel in 1972, at the height of his combinatorial experiments, building a narrative that is also a proof: that language creates the places it pretends merely to describe. Every city is Venice. Every city is the mind contemplating its own architecture. The book is brief enough to hold in one hand and vast enough to contain every city you have loved or imagined loving.