![]() ![]() Il secondo è rischioso ed esige attenzione e apprendimento continui: cercare e saper riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all’inferno, non è inferno, e farlo durare, e dargli spazio. Il primo riesce facile a molti: accettare l’inferno e diventarne parte fino al punto di non vederlo più. Già il Gran Kan stava sfogliando nel suo atlante le carte delle città che minacciano negli incubi e nelle maledizioni: Enoch, Babilonia, Butua, Brave New World.ĭice: “Tutto è inutile, se l’ultimo approdo non può essere che la città infernale, ed è là in fondo che, in una spirale sempre più stretta, ci risucchia la corrente”.Į Polo: “L’inferno dei viventi non è qualcosa che sarà se ce n’è uno, è quello che è già qui, l’inferno che abitiamo tutti i giorni, che formiamo stando insieme. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. There are two ways to escape suffering it. He said: “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”Īnd Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. IE University.Įxcerpt of Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili) by Italo Calvino (1972).Īlready the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahool and Butua, Brave New World. In terms of being an investigation of storytelling, Invisible Cities is often compared with stories by Jorge Luis Borges (in particular “The Library of Babel”) and several of Samuel Beckett’s novels, including The Unnamable and Malone Dies.Goretti González – Visiting Professor & Academic Coordinator of Humanities, IE School of Global & Public Affairs. Constrained writing techniques can include mathematical and cyclical organization of the kind used in Invisible Cities, or, as in Georges Perec’s novel The Void, using a lipogram (not using one particular letter throughout the novel in that case, the letter e). Additionally, Calvino was a member of the Oulipo group of writers, founded in 1960, that focused on writing prose and poetry using systems of constrained writing. Calvino wrote his master’s thesis on Joseph Conrad, who is best known for Heart of Darkness, and though Conrad wrote in an entirely different style than Calvino, both men focus to a degree on exploration of “new” lands and the consequences of such exploration. Within Invisible Cities, Calvino makes direct references to Thomas More’s Utopia and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, as well as to Guy Debord’s seminal 1967 philosophical work Society of the Spectacle, which critiques modern consumer culture and criticizes modern dependence on images to mediate experiences. Invisible Cities draws on The Travels of Marco Polo, which was recorded late in the 13th century by Rustichello de Pisa from Polo’s recollections of his travels. Calvino died in 1985 of a cerebral hemorrhage. ![]() He wrote Invisible Cities during this time. After the death of a close friend and the cultural revolution in France, Calvino went through an “intellectual depression” and joined the Oulipo group of writers. He left the Italian Communist Party after the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1957, and though he retained his belief in communism as a concept, he never joined another party. After this, he began to write fantastical novels, all of which were well received. He began publishing novels and stories to great acclaim in the late 1940s, but his realist novels received poor reviews. Following the war, Calvino returned to Turin, completed a master’s thesis on Joseph Conrad, and became active in communist groups and publications. He went into hiding rather than join the military, decided that communists had the most convincing argument, and joined the communist Italian Resistance in 1944. During World War II, Calvino enrolled at the University of Turin and then at the University of Florence in their Agriculture departments, hiding his literary interests. ![]() His parents were openly derisive of both religion and the ruling National Fascist Party and as such, they exempted Calvino from religious classes at school. His father spent time in Mexico before moving to Cuba, and his mother gave Calvino his first name to remind him of his Italian heritage-though Calvino’s family moved back to Europe when Calvino was two years old. Additional copyrights: Text 1972 by Italo Calvino. Calvino was born in 1923 to Italian botanists and agronomists. Produced as a limited edition bookwork featuring extracts from Italo Calvinos Invisible Cities.
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