Invisible Cities

Don't know it at all.

Okay, number 95 is Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

Um, I am, have heard of the author, but I have not actually read this one.

Yeah, no.

I started this story at a writing retreat in Italy, where I spent a week in a thousand-year-old monastery north of Siena.

I'd read Calvino's Invisible Cities for the retreat.

and it bounced around in my head along with the gorgeous architecture of Siena and hit an old idea of mine that I wanted the city floating above to be total trash and the city in the dirt to be idyllic a sort of reversal of the trope I'd seen a lot Humans love to invent and speculate about idealized cities and societies.

From the mythical Atlantis, to the Kallipolis of Socrates, up to Thomas More's Utopia and beyond.

Um, this is kind of not a greater than a sum of its parts, but an equal to the sum of its parts comparison.

Um, this show gave me Star Trek meets invisible cities.

Now let me explain what I mean

by that.

uh parentheses complimentary by the way yeah

um

star trek we know you go to a planet you're like wow these people do some weird stuff and they're doing it wrong but what's up with that so that's kind of self-explanatory um invisible cities one of my favorite books of all time metallo calvino i've probably talked about on a podcast before um And the premise of the book is it's Marco Polo recounting his travels to Kublai Khan, who's like ailing and dying, but wanting to hear about the vastness of his empire and all the cities within it.

And every... section of the book is like the name of a city and a page of almost like a prose poem about what the city's like, but every city is extremely fantastical.

We have spoken about this, actually.

Invisible Cities by...

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that is exactly that.

So, you know, the story of Invisible Cities, I mean, it's only about 100 pages long, so it doesn't really count.

The story is...

It definitely

counts.