About the Author - 25 Pieces of Information

Author - Italo Calvino
Text - Invisible Cities

5 Quotes/ selected pieces of writing

"Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."

"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."

"Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little."

"You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognised that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are."

"Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say."

"Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.'
Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch."

"Or else the cloud hovered, having barely left the lips, dense and slow, and suggested another vision: the exhalations that hang over the roofs of the metropolises, the opaque smoke that is not scattered, the hood of miasmata that weighs over the bituminous streets. Not the labile mists of memory nor the dry transparence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows, the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would find at the end of your journey."

"The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past"

"Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognises the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have."

5 Motifs

Travel/discovery
Layers

Memory

Desire

Decay

Home/homesick

Venice

Pattern/structure/architectural layout
Signs/symbols
Games/disbelief/misleading
Meaning hidden within 

Cities described as if they were a woman

5 Characters

Marco Polo - Explorer and lover of his home Venice
Kublai Khan - Emperor 

5 Locations

Emperor Kublai Khan's garden: The setting in which explorer Marco Polo describes his invisible cities to the emperor.
The city of Venice: The city in which all of Marco Polo's descriptions are about
Desert
City of Zaira (Memory)
City of Tamara (Signs)
City of Fedora (Desire)

Octavia (Thin)
Eutropia (Trading)
Moriana (Eyes)
Leandra (Names)
Adelma (Dead)
Thekla (Sky)
Cecilia (continuous)
Theodora (Hidden)

5 Pieces of information about the author

Calvino hid his love of literature from his family for many years whilst attending university and studying agriculture, as his parents had.

Extremely interested in politics and became a member of the Italian Communist Party in 1945 after experiencing war.

"I began doing what came most naturally to me – that is, following the memory of the things I had loved best since boyhood. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic."

Between 1964 - 67, Calvino returned to his home country of Cuba and was introduced to Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. After Guevara's death, Calvino wrote a tribute to him which was both published in Cuba and later on in Italy.

In 1966 Calvino experienced an 'intellectual depression" which he described as a very important experience in his life "...I ceased to be young. Perhaps it's a metabolic process, something that comes with age, I'd been young for a long time, perhaps too long, suddenly I felt that I had to begin my old age, yes, old age, perhaps with the hope of prolonging it by beginning it early."