![]() In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by he is seated in a row with them. ![]() The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man he arrives at Isidora in his old age. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. ![]() He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time. All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theater, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. 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. 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. Normally, I put the three-star books in the "To be exchanged" pile, but this is one of the rare ones that has piqued my interest enough to keep around. It definitely merits another reading, perhaps in the order of each type of city. Trying to imagine how he comes up with such scenarios and descriptions is mind-boggling. Any way you look at it, Calvino is a master wordsmith. The concluding conversation was poignant as well. The book picked up pace and attracted me more in the later chapters, especially 5-7, when the narrative was a little more coherent. After reading this, Baron in the Trees, and If on a Winter´s Night a Traveler, I still enjoyed the last one the best. ![]() ![]() It seemed pointless to me a lot of the time. Unfortunately, my taste is not sophisticated enough I´ve never been able to fully enjoy poetry, and the same goes with this book. Each city description is flowery and organic both in its formation and the image it evokes in your mind. If you like poetry, you will appreciate this book more than I did. I can recognize its brilliance without really having liked it that much. Impressive, though not entirely enjoyable. ![]()
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