• The Arts
• E C S Jongeneel

Contents. Description The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer,. The book is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo to prove the expanse of Khan's empire, but which are all actually just descriptions of one city, Venice.

Short dialogues between the two characters are interspersed every five to ten cities and are used to discuss various ideas presented by the cities on a wide range of topics including and. The interludes between Khan and Polo are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories. Historical background , Polo's travel diary depicting his purported journey across Asia and in Yuan Dynasty China, written in the 13th century, shares with Invisible Cities the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities Polo claimed to have visited, accompanied by descriptions of the city's inhabitants, notable, and whatever interesting tales Polo had heard about the region. Structure Over the nine chapters, Marco describes a total of fifty-five cities, all women's names. The cities are divided into eleven thematic groups of five each:.

Cities & Memory. Cities & Desire. Cities & Signs. Thin Cities.

Trading Cities. Cities & Eyes. Cities & Names. Cities & the Dead. Cities & the Sky. Continuous Cities.

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Hidden Cities He moves back and forth between the groups, while moving down the list, in a rigorous mathematical structure. The table below lists the cities in order of appearance, along with the group they belong to: Chapter No.

E C S Jongeneel

Reed Johnson, October 19, 2013. Mark Swed, October 21, 2013. Jeffrey Marlow, October 22, 2013. Jessica Gelt, October 2, 2014. Sandra Barrera, October 24, 2014.

Julie Baumgardner, October 29, 2014., Pulitzer.org, April 14, 2014. External links. Silvestri, Paolo, 'After-word. 'Invisible cities': which (good-bad) man? For which (good-bad) polity?' Silvestri (eds.), Good government, Governance and Human Complexity.

Luigi Einaudi’s Legacy and Contemporary Society, Leo Olschki, Firenze, 2012, pp.