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Estratti da:

“Le città invisibili”, Italo Calvino, 1972

                

English version:

From:

“Invisible cities”,Italo Calvino,1972

[...]

TRADING CITIES 2

In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each
encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take
place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone;
eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking othereyes, never stopping. A girl comes
along, twirling a parasol on her shoulder, and twirling slightly also her rounded hips. A
woman in black comes along, showing her fullage, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her
lips trembling. A tattooed giant comes along; a young man with white hair; a female
dwarf; two girls, twins, dressed in coral. Something runs among them, an exchange of
glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles,
until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the
scene: a blind man with a cheetah on a leash, a courtesan with an ostrich-plume fan,
anephebe, a Fat Woman. And thus, when some people happen to find themselves
together, taking shelter from the rain under an arcade, or crowding beneath anawning of
the bazaar, or stopping to listen to the band in the square, meetings, seductions,
copulations, orgies are consummated among them without a word exchanged, without a
finger touching anything, almost without an eye raised. A voluptuous vibration constantly
stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities. If men and women began to live their ephemeral
dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits,
pretences, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would
stop.

[...]
TRADING CITIES 4
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch
strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or grey or black-and-white
according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, oftrade, authority, agency. When
the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the
inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.
From a mountain side, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the
labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and
they are nothing. They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings
which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the
other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.
Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned
cities without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind
rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

[...]
TRADING CITIES 5
In Esmeralda, city of water, a network of canals and a network of streets span and

intersect each other. To go from one place to another you have always the choice between
land and boat: and since the shortest distance between two points in Esmeralda is not a
straight line but a zigzag that ramifies in tortuous optional routes, the ways that open to
each passerby are never two, but many, and they increase further for those who alternate
a stretch by boat with one on dry land. And so Esmeralda’s inhabitants are spared the
boredom of following the same streets every day. And that is not all: the network of
routes is not arranged on one level, but follows instead an up-and-down course of steps,
landings, cambered bridges, hanging streets. Combining segments of the various routes,
elevated or on ground level, each inhabitant can enjoy every day the pleasure of a new
itinerary to reach the same places. The most fixed and calm lives in Esmeralda are spent
without any repetition. Secret and adventurous lives, here as elsewhere, are subject to
greater restrictions. Esmeralda’s cats, thieves, illicit lovers move along higher,
discontinuous ways, dropping from a rooftop to a balcony, following gutterings with
acrobats’ steps. Below, the rats run in the darkness of the sewers, one behind the other’s
tail, along with conspirators and smugglers: they peep out of manholes and drainpipes,
they slip through double bottoms and ditches, from one hiding place to another they drag
crusts of cheese, contraband goods, kegs of gunpowder, crossing the city’s compactness
pierced by the spokes of underground passages. A map of Esmeralda should include,
marked in different coloured inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It
is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the
roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito,
spiralling upwards, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all
the points of the city.

[...]
CITIES & THE SKY 1
In Eudoxia, which spreads both upwards and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead
ends, hovels, a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city’s true form. At first
sight nothing seems to resemble Eudoxia less than the design of that carpet, laid out in
symmetrical motives whose patterns are repeated along straight and circular lines,
interwoven with brilliantly coloured spires, in a repetition that can be followed throughout
the whole woof. But if you pause and examine it carefully, you become convinced that
each place in the carpet corresponds to a place in the city and all the things contained in
the city are included in the design, arranged according to their true relationship, which
escapes your eye distracted by the bustle, the throngs, the shoving. All of Eudoxia’s
confusion, the mules’ braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is evident in the
incomplete perspective you grasp; but the carpet proves that there is a point from which
the city shows its true proportions, the geometrical scheme implicit in its every, tiniest
detail. It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you concentrate and stare at the carpet,
you recognize the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or magenta thread
which, on a wide loop, brings you to the purple enclosure that is your real destination.
Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet’s immobile order with his own image of
the city, an anguish of his own, and each can find, concealed among the arabesques, an
answer, the story of his life, the twists of fate. An oracle was questioned about the
mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the
two objects–the oracle replied–has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits
in which the worlds revolve; the other is approximate reflection, like every human
creation. For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet’s harmonious pattern
was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But

you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is
the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets,
houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the
darkness.