The class board was filled with the name of the different cities in Invisible City and each of us were assigned a city and today we had to come to class and talk about it. My city was Sophronia, so it’s a city which is made up of two halves:

1. The first half is made up of great roller coaster with its steep humps, the carousel with its chain spokes, the Ferris wheel of spinning cages, the death-ride with crouching motorcyclists, the big top with the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle.
2. The second half is made up of stone, marble and cement, with the bank, the factories, the palaces, the slaughterhouse, the school, and all the rest.

One half of the city is permanent while the other half is temporary. When the period of its sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off, transplanting it to the vacant lots of another half-city.

My thoughts:

When the seemingly solid half of Sophronia is the one to pack up every year, it suggests another cycle of civilisation—and implies that what a person can find anywhere, no matter where a place is in the cycle, are delights. The bright and fun parts of the world, in essence, are the ones that can always be found, while civilisation proper is in shorter supply. A few things to notice in this city is how the joy rides have been described in such a way that it doesn’t make them joyous anymore. Also the other half of the city just being broken down and leaving Sophronia sounds like a difficult task to do. One half is filled with fantasies and the other half is the real world.

We talked about all the cities that we had read and gave our review on them. The cities about which I gave a review on are:

ERSILIA:

In Ersilia, people stretch strings between corners of houses to denote relationships of blood, trade, or authority. They leave when the strings become too thick to pass through, and leave only poles and the strings. Refugees look back; they’re still looking at Ersilia. They rebuild Ersilia in another place and stretch strings in a way that they hope is more complex and more regular than the last time. They continue to move from place to place. Travellers will come upon the ruins of these abandoned cities and be able to look at webs of relationships seeking a form.

My thoughts:

When people move and rebuild Ersilia again and again, trying to make their relationships with their neighbors increasingly better, it suggests both that people are constantly seeking better and that it’s impossible to ever truly achieve anything better by doing this. Further, when the strings remain, it suggests that human connection is more solid than the cities where humans live. It’s possible to see how people connected with one another, even if the cities themselves are gone.

ANASTASIA:

Three days south is the city of Anastasia, which is composed of concentric canals. Here, a person can find excellent pheasant and, according to rumors, beautiful women who invite men to bathe with them. The true essence of Anastasia, however, is that it awakens a person’s desires and promptly stifles them. The city’s desires are different from humans’, so people can only sit with their desire. Some people argue over whether this power is malignant or benign. People who cut agate and onyx give form to others’ desires, and a visitor believes they’re enjoying Anastasia when really, they’re a slave to it.

My thoughts:

Anastasia is the first hint that Calvino isn’t just describing fantastical cities. Instead, Anastasia reads as a critique of modern, capitalist society, which holds that people can work to achieve their goals and their dreams—but for most people, especially in the eyes of someone who, like Calvino, isn’t enamored of capitalism, capitalism doesn’t actually allow people to experience success, even if it has the ability to make people feel as though they’re making progress.

HYPATIA:

Marco Polo says that travelers always have to deal with changes in language. In Hypatia, the change is a difference in things, not words. He recalls entering Hypatia and wandering through beautiful lagoons. He expected to see women bathing, but he only found crabs eating dead bodies. Feeling cheated, Marco went to ask the sultan. In the palace, he found convicts. He went to the library to find a philosopher. He found him in a playground. The philosopher told Marco, “signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.” Marco realised that he needed to reevaluate how he reads signs. Now, he knows he’ll find beautiful women in the stables, and if he wants to leave, he should go to the highest point of the citadel to wait for a ship-but it might not come, as language is about deceit.

My thoughts:

The assertion that language is about deceit ties back to semiotics. As Marco moves through Hypatia, he has to relearn how to read the city in order to find what he wants. This, along with the assertion that language is about deceit, gets at the fact that language, spoken or written, ostensibly has very little to do with what it describes. The word cat, for instance, either written or spoken, looks and sounds nothing like the creature it refers to-rather, people have learned (or have been deceived) to know that the combination of letters, and the sound they make, describes a house pet.

BERENICE:

Marco Polo refuses to tell Kublai Khan about Berenice, the unjust city. Instead, he’ll describe the Berenice of the just, which is hidden. People handle materials in shadowy back rooms, and when giant cogs jam, a quiet ticking suggests that something else is governing the city. Instead of describing perfumed baths where unjust people in Berenice eye women, he’ll share how the just cautiously evade spies and recognise each other by their punctuation and their cuisine. From this, it’s possible to deduce Berenice’s future, but it’s important to keep in mind that within the city of the just, there’s a malignant seed containing certainty and pride. This seed turns into bitterness, resentment, and the desire of the just to both get revenge on the unjust and live the way the unjust do.

My thoughts:

Berenice again points to a cycle in which humans try to overthrow bloated and powerful regimes, but it suggests that it’s not as straightforward as previous battles between the rats and the swallows may have led the reader to think. In this case, Calvino suggests that the premise itself is wrong, since even those who are on the side of good and justice have in them a seed of injustice and want revenge. However, this also suggests that wanting to be rich and powerful is part of the human condition, even if it is universally destructive.

While reading the book I realised that few chapters are either similar in their ways and few are also completely opposite to each other like Valdrado and Zenobia are related by the bridges and labour, they are cross overs; Eutropia and Andria are completely opposite and Eudoxia and Aglaura are quite similar. All the cities described in this book are in Venice, Italy.