Italo Calvino is like his own character Marco Polo and I want to visually represented this in my final prints/animated sting. I will show visually how Calvino uses memory, his memory palace psychology techniques and thoughts to physically conjure up the 3 separate cities for the audience. Memories growing from his thoughts and head and turning into the cities.
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Quotes:
Theme of Venice:
“There is still one of which you never speak.'
Marco Polo bowed his head.
'Venice,' the Khan said.
Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?'
The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.'
And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
In Invisible Cities Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice. As Gore Vidal wrote 'Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.'
― Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Invisible-Cities-Vintage-Classics-Calvino/dp/0099429837
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Venice and Memory Palace theme:
“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.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“There is no language without deceit.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind.
[…]
Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“And Polo answers, "Traveling, you realise that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities...”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past:”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Blueprint theme:
“Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“KUBLAI: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden.
POLO: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of learn. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Imagination, ideas, dreams:
“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. 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.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“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.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“An invisible landscape conditions the visible one”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
“Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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Research Article:
J. Winterson on Venice and Calvino, 2001
http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/journalism/invisible-cities/
"Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a series of descriptions, really conversations, told by his fictitious Marco Polo to an invented Kublai Khan. As Marco travels round the world on the Emperor’s business, his job is not to bring back treasure or trade, but to barter in stories – the accumulated wealth of his imagination.
Here are all the cities ever dreamed of; thin cities, cities and desire, cities and the dead, cities and memory, continuous cites, cities and signs. All are named after women – Raissa, Irene, Phyillis, Chloe… ‘In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the street are all strangers. At each encounter they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no-one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.’
Calvino was writing about Venice – all the Venice’s collapsed, folded or vanished behind the tourist façade. Anyone who loves Venice, knows that its true life is half-glimpsed or dreamed, that the city reconfigures itself, yielding suddenly as you turn into a deserted square, snapping shut, as you walk past San Marco.
Venice has not disappeared under the pressure of mass tourism – it has dissolved. It is no longer possible to look at the buildings and see anything of value. The only way to get at Venice is to use the water- its refractions, reflections, the play of light and shadow, and to re-create Venice where it has always been strongest – in the imagination.
There is a city surrounded by water, with watery alleys that do for streets and roads and silted up back ways that only the rats can cross. Miss your way, which is easy to do, and you may find yourself staring at a hundred eyes, guarding a filthy palace of sacks and bones. Find your way, which is easy to do, and you may meet an old woman in a doorway. She will tell your fortune, depending on your face.’
Not Calvino, me, writing The Passion in 1987 before I had been to Venice. The Venice I found when I arrived was not a disappointment – it was unreal. Venice is a city you must design and build for yourself. The tourist Venice is a chimera, the historical Venice is a museum. The living Venice is the one where every canal and palazzo and sun-shy square, with its iron well and unlisted church, has been privately mapped. No one can show you Venice. There is no such place. Out of the multiple Venice’s, none authentic, only you can find the one that has any value.
Venice’s extremes – its Disneyishness and its invisibility, are not unique, they are the lesser experience of many cities. In Venice the experience is concentrated. There is nowhere less rewarding, nowhere more maddening. The secret Venice guidebooks are useless. This is not New York or Rome. Venice can only be read as fiction. Visiting Venice is to become a fiction yourself – at least if you want to get any sense of it. The facts tell you nothing. This is a cusp city, working at the intersection of art and life – where the best fiction works too.
Reading Calvino reading Venice is a reminder of how often the controlled, measured world of knowledge fails us. So much of life resists the facts. Imagining Venice is imagining yourself, as Khan discovers – an unsettling exercise, but necessary, perhaps."
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