#invisible cities

[thebeautifulbook]

INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino. [San Diego: Harvest, 1972]

Art Binding by Dmitri Koutsipetsidis, He’s known for his great bindings on FRANKENSTEIN, THE WASTELAND, THE HOBBIT, THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

source — about the design

source — read

[dandelionjack]

WHAT IS A DREAM CITY? what it says on the tin — an urban environment that you have involuntarily visited multiple, repeated times in dreams. to be a dream city, it must not be a real-life place, whether one you have physically travelled to/lived in or one that you have seen videos of.

doesn’t need to look “alien”. mine, though some of the architecture is quite distinctive, resembles a southern european city, with most of the structures seeming 19th century

the storylines that play out and characters which feature may vary, but the setting crucially must remain the same or at least very similar. certain recurring locations must be present (buildings, streets, landmarks, a river, a bar — for me at least, but once again these locations could be anything in your personal experience).

you will find that, despite logically never having “been” here in reality, you always know where to go, as if you’re a long-term resident or at least a well-prepared tourist.

the public transport is usually weird. for me it’s mostly a winding system of subway networks, complex and misleading like a labyrinth, naturally. what’s a dream city without a maze

so, that’s enough detail for you to know which button to vote for by now. no nuance. either you drop by the dream city on the regular or you don’t.

reblog for reach. and no i don’t have a clue on what i’m planning to do with the results, thanks for asking

[calliop-e]

Italo Calvino, from Invisible Cities

[watermotif]

CITIES & THE DEAD 2

Never in all my travels had I ventured as far as Adelma. It was dusk when I landed there. On the dock the sailor who caught the rope and tied it to the bollard resembled a man who had soldiered with me and was dead. It was the hour of the wholesale fish market. An old man was loading a basket of sea urchins on a cart; I thought I recognized him; when I turned, he had disappeared down an alley, but I realized that he looked like a fisherman who, already old when I was a child, could no longer be among the living. I was upset by the sight of a fever victim huddled on the ground, a blanket over his head: my father a few days before his death had yellow eyes and a growth of beard like this man. I turned my gaze aside; I no longer dared look anyone in the face.

I thought: 'If Adelma is a city I am seeing in a dream, where you encounter only the dead, the dream frightens me. If Adelma is a real city, inhabited by living people, I need only continue looking at them and the resemblances will dissolve, alien faces will appear, bearing anguish. In either case it is best for me not to insist on staring at them.

A vegetable vendor was weighing a cabbage on a scales and put it in a basket dangling on a string a girl lowered from a balcony. The girl was identical with one in my village who had gone mad for love and killed herself. The vegetable vendor raised her face: she was my grandmother.

I thought: 'You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.'

The stevedores climbed the steps in a line, bent beneath demijohns and barrels; their faces were hidden by sackcloth hoods; 'Now they will straighten up and I will recognize them,' I thought, with impatience and fear. But I could not take my eyes off them; if I turned my gaze just a little towards the crowd that crammed those narrow streets, I was assailed by unexpected faces, reappearing from far away, staring at me as if demanding recognition, as if to recognize me, as if they had already recognized me. Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidoscope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces.

I thought: 'Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead.' And I also thought: 'This means the beyond is not happy.'

italo calvino, invisible cities (tr. by william weaver)

[andmaybegayer]

The Rumor Come Out: Does Marco Polo and Kublai Khan is Gay?

[regicidal-defenestration]

[malojasnake]

— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

[vuenville]

Photo credit David Cousin Marsy

Invisibles cities

[etudiantfantome]

Invisible Cities

[noosphe-re]

In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses it toward the outside. Olinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains, in the center, the old narrow girdle of the walls from which the withered spires rise, the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around them like a loosened belt. Not Olinda: the old walls expand bearing the old quarters with them, enlarged, but maintaining their proportions on a broader horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters, which also grew up on the margins and became thinner to make room for still more recent ones pressing from inside; and so, on and on, to the heart of the city, a totally new Olinda which, in its reduced dimensions retains the features and the flow of lymph of the first Olinda and of all the Olindas that have blossomed one from the other; and within this innermost circle there are already blossoming—though it is hard to discern them—the next Olinda and those that will grow after it.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

[teethburied]

…A Valparaíso (1963) dir. Joris Ivens

[bowostudio]

BoWo Stusio, The Lodger: Five minutes before midnight, 2024 (collage)

art prints >

The Lodger: Five minutes before midnight, 2024 (paper collage)

(detail - ground floor)

The Lodger: Five minutes before midnight, 2024 ( paper collage) (detail - 1st floor)

The Lodger: Five minutes before midnight, 2024 ( paper collage) (detail - 2nd floor)

The Lodger: Five minutes before midnight, 2024 (collage) (detail - 3rd floor)

The Lodger: Five minutes before midnight, 2024 (collage) (detail - attic)

[eelartdump]

Fedora, from Invisible Cities

[neutron669]

Invisibile Cities of Italo Calvino by Dave McKean

[fishingforwords]

the world was made for us to see.

oxford english dictionary || italo calvino, invisible cities || team cherry, hollow knight || henry david thoreau, walden || one piece || eurythmics, sweet dreams (are made of this) || mary oliver, wild geese || bill watterson, calvin and hobbes