The book has nine chapters, but there are also hidden divisions within the book: each of the 55 cities belongs to one of eleven thematic groups (explained below). In the novel, the reader finds themselves playing a game with the author, wherein they must find the patterns hidden in the book. Invisible Cities is an example of Calvino's use of combinatory literature, and shows clear influences of semiotics and structuralism. The original 13th-century travelogue shares with Calvino's novel the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities Polo claimed to have visited, along with descriptions of the city's inhabitants, notable imports and exports, and whatever interesting tales Polo had heard about the region. Invisible Cities deconstructs an archetypal example of the travel literature genre, The Travels of Marco Polo, which depicts the journey of the famed Venetian merchant across Asia and in Yuan China ( Mongol Empire). Polo's response: "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."
In one key exchange in the middle of the book, Kublai prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has never mentioned directly-his hometown. These interludes between the two characters are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories. Short dialogues between Kublai and Polo are interspersed every five to ten cities discussing these topics. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as parables or meditations on culture, language, time, memory, death, or the general nature of human experience. The book is framed as a conversation between the elderly and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and Polo. The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer, Marco Polo. It was published in Italy in 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore. Invisible Cities ( Italian: Le città invisibili) is a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino.
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