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he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present. Marco Polo agrees: "Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased." The emperor soon determines that each of these fantastic places is really the same place. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again. After the dream they set out in search of that city they never found it, but they found one another they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the flutings and juttings of the facades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms' interiors with ceilings and floors, the perspective of the halls, the mirrors of the wardrobes.And Zobeide.įrom there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the water. All are named after women (as they must be, since cities are feminine in Italian) - Raissa, Irene, Phyillis, Olinda, Armilla, Chloe, Valdrada.
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Here are all the cities ever dreamed of, strange magical invisible cities that nobody else ever saw. Marco Polo diverts the emperor with tales of cities that he has seen within the empire and Kublai Khan listens, searches for a pattern in Marco Polo's cities. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire, of his cities, of himself. In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo - Tartar emperor and Venetian traveller.
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Calvino, I think, would have relished it. (From Le Città Invisibili by Italo Calvino translation William Weaver)ĭesigned by Italian architects Alessandro Tonni and Manuela Spera, the city Calvino inspired is meant to create a meeting point between architecture and literature. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it. This said, it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. But what is certain is that if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines, with its pilings and its suspended stairways, a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first model. No one remembers what need or command or desire drove Zenobia’s founders to give their city this form, and so there is no telling whether it was satisfied by the city as we see it today, which has perhaps grown through successive superimpositions from the first, now undecipherable plan. Now I shall tell of the city of Zenobia, which is wonderful in this fashion: though set on dry terrain it stands in high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging sidewalks, surmounted by cone-roofed belvederes, barrels storing water, weather vanes, jutting pulleys, and fish poles, and cranes.