Although each city has a different female name, as his narrative progresses the reader comes to realize that they share features in common. The second narrative strand is Polo’s descriptions of the 55 cities he has visited. By obtaining this knowledge, Khan eases his insecurity that his claim on the lands and people he has conquered is tenuous. Readers immediately learn that Khan favors Polo above other ambassadors because he does not just report factually on Khan’s great empire but gives the latter a sense of what life is like in the cities.
The first is the meeting of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo at Khan’s palace. Invisible Cities interweaves two narrative threads. This guide uses the 2010 Vintage Kindle Edition, which features the original English translation of William Weaver.
Additionally, some critics, including the Guardian newspaper’s art critic Jonathan Jones, consider Invisible Cities to be a form of travel literature about Venice, as many of Polo’s reports to Khan detail features of his native city (Jones). It was adapted into an opera by Christopher Cerrone and in 2013 was staged in Los Angeles’ Union Station. Invisible Cities continued to influence artists and creatives long after its publication date.
While the meeting between these two historic figures was one of Calvino’s inspirations, the other was Polo’s 1298 manuscript titled The Travels of Marco Polo, in which he gave fragmentary descriptions of all the cities he visited. For more than 10 years, Khan kept Polo in his service, sending him to different parts of his empire to collect taxes and report on conditions there. Another meeting occurred between the men in Khan’s summer palace at Xanadu. Invisible Cities continues this trend by using the historic meeting between the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan and the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo as a basis for investigating the conception, experience, and evolution of cities.Īt the first meeting between Polo and Khan in the 1260s, Khan asked Polo to tell him about European affairs. According to New York Times reviewer Joseph McElroy, Calvino already had the reputation of being Italy’s “most original storyteller” for his use of fantastical and fabulist motifs to explore philosophical and scientific themes such as evolution (McElroy).
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