Invisible city

Do you know the Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities?  It's a remarkable book, a short collection of descriptions of cities, only a page or two long.  They are told by Marco Polo to Kubla Khan, and they are all mythical, and they are all Venice.  To give the mood through short quotations, or through any description of mine, seems too hard, so I have picked two longer pieces.  The cities, or the essays, are arranged in different sections and vary a great deal, but they all have an elegiac, longing quality which is wholly charming.  The first extract is from Cities and Eyes, and describes Olinda.  After the photograph is Moriana from Hidden Cities.

In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses its way toward the outside.

Olinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains, in the centre, the old narrow girdle of the walls from which the withered spires rise, the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around them like a loosened belt. Not Olinda: the old walls expand bearing the old quarters with them, enlarged but maintaining their proportions an a broader horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters, which also grew up on the margins and became thinner to make room for still more recent ones pressing from inside; and so, on and on, to the heart of the city, a totally new Olinda which, in its reduced dimensions retains the features and the flow of lymph of the first Olinda and of all the Olindas that have blossomed one from the other; and within this innermost circle there are always blossoming--though it is hard to discern them--the next Olinda and those that will grow after it.

When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa-shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk a semi-circle and you will come into view of Moriana's hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sackcloths, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, behind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.

From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.

Comments

[christian louboutin]

I am totally immersed myself in the excellent stuff.It is our great pleasure to share the wonderful blog with you. Best Regards!

[glo]

LOL, LOL, LOL
Am I the only one who sees a few typos in this post?
Is it a consequence of April's fool day or a new game on this mind-entertaining blog?
Well, I found these:
squeares/squares
girlde/girdle
repretory/repertory
seperated/separated
Did I miss any?

PS: I am glad the lovely cat is back! I'll write a message for him by the end of the week as I feel I have rather neglected him lately.

[Peter the flautist]

One of my favourite books. Sadly I have only been to Venice Airport and not to the city itself. Dark Puss