Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Most Anticipated Books of 2025!

Summary and Reviews of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities

by Italo Calvino
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • First Published:
  • Jan 1, 1974, 165 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2013, 176 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory.

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

Excerpt
Invisible Cities

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. 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. 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 ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

But if Invisible Cities did nothing but frogmarch the reader from one obvious message to another, it wouldn't be a classic of postmodern literature. Even at his headiest, Calvino was a playful writer, endlessly imaginative and inventive. The novel's tone is mostly reflective, even somber, but beneath meditations on capitalism and semiotics, there is a treasure trove of the weird and wonderful. In just a page-and-a-half, Calvino makes any given city feel more intriguing and tangible than the tedious worldbuilding of dozens of fantasy novels. Polo's stories are full of anachronisms like dirigibles and Ferris wheels, and Calvino's eerily precise prose makes the reader feel as though they're viewing pockets of existence in a great white void. Somehow, it only makes the story more plausible: we sense that we can step outside ourselves, squint into the distance, and see faint but unmistakable skylines dotting the horizon...continued

Full Review (489 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner).

Media Reviews

New York Times
Italy's most original storyteller…Invisible Cities is an elegy, autumnal and melancholy.

The New York Review of Books
Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.

NPR
It's best, I think, to read Invisible Cities like a traveler—slowly, luxuriously, as if you have all the time in the world.

Reader Reviews

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



Marco Polo

Mosaic painting of Marco Polo from 1867, depicting the explorer as a bearded man holding maps and books wearing a red robe and hatAlthough Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities concerns itself with two real people, it is far from historical fiction. The Marco Polo who describes city after fantastical city to Kublai Khan broadly resembles the Venetian merchant and explorer of the 13th century: both traveled the Eastern world and (allegedly, in the real Polo's case) served in Kublai's court. But Polo's musings on memory, semiotics, and desire, not to mention the erudite, poetic language he uses in Invisible Cities, are all Calvino's invention.

In fact, the real Marco Polo didn't actually write The Travels of Marco Polo, the travelogue that made him immortal. After his return from Asia, where he spent 17 years traveling and peddling his wares, Polo joined the Venetian army...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Invisible Cities, try these:

We have 4 read-alikes for Invisible Cities, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $50 for 12 months or $18 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Wager
    by David Grann
    From the bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a gripping story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.
  • Book Jacket
    The Frozen River
    by Ariel Lawhon
    From the bestselling author of I Was Anastasia comes a historical mystery inspired by 18th-century midwife Martha Ballard, who investigates a shocking murder.
  • Book Jacket
    The Bluest Eye
    by Toni Morrison
    The story of a black girl in America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others. First published 1970; won the 1993 Nobel Prize.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Three Days in June
    by Anne Tyler

    A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

  • Book Jacket

    Harlem Rhapsody
    by Victoria Christopher Murray

    The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance.

  • Book Jacket

    Beast of the North Woods
    by Annelise Ryan

    When a local fisherman is mauled to death, it seems like the only possible cause is a mythical creature.

Who Said...

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading, you wish the author that wrote it was a ...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

D to T N

and be entered to win..