The Margin

Calvino's Invisible Cities¹ is a book I keep returning to, less to read than to sit inside. The frame story — Marco Polo describing impossible cities to a doubting Kublai Khan — is barely a plot. The book is a long argument with itself about what a city is, and whether describing a place is the same as building it.

What I notice this time is the architecture. The book is structured in groups of five, with each chapter a careful permutation; the cities themselves come in categories — Cities & Memory, Thin Cities, Continuous Cities². It's a personal codex disguised as a travelogue.

Reading it in Lisboa, I keep finding the cities here: the trading cities are the Baixa, the cities & eyes are São Jorge, the continuous cities are the new builds in Parque das Nações. The book gives me categories for places I already know.