Italo Calvino-Invisible Cities Project 3D

The Invisible Cities By Italo Calvino

 Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He is an

essayist and journalist as well as a novelist, and is a member of the editorial

staff of the Turin publishing firm Giulio Einaudi Editore. His other novels

include _The Castle of Crossed Destinies__ (also published in Picador),

_Cosmicomics,__ and _t zero.__ In 1973 Italo Calvino won the prestigious Italian

literary award, the Premio Feltrinelli.

 First published of  Invisible Cities in 1972

translated from the Italian by William Weaver

Invisible Cities

_Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he

describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars

does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity

than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors

there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the

territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall

soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of

emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odour of the elephants after the

rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes

rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they

are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us

the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax

of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies' protection, offering in

exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It

is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us

the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene

has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy

sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's

accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to

crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites'

gnawing.__

Eudoxia

By Marcus Inkpen

Machinima Fuschia Nightfire

 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.

Armilla 

By Romy Nayar & Ux hax

Machinima Hypatia Pickens

Collaborator:

Leona80 Mhia

Nadiemequiere

 THIN CITIES 3

Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been

demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know.

The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that

makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses

should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of

pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo's

white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still

hanging from the boughs. You would think the plumbers had finished their job and

gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems,

indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of

termites.

Abandoned before or after it was inhabited. Armilla cannot be called

deserted. At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to

glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature,

luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in

the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at

a mirror. In the sun, the threads of water fanning from the showers glisten, the

jets of the taps, the spurts, the splashes, the sponges' suds.

I have come to this explanation: the streams of water channelled in the

pipes of Armilla have remained in the possession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed

to travelling along underground veins, they found it easy to enter into the new

aquatic realm, to burst from multiple fountains, to find new mirrors, new games,

new ways of enjoying the water. Their invasion may have been built by humans as a

votive offering to win the favour of the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the

waters. In any case, now they seem content, these maidens: in the morning you hear

them singing.

Isaura 

By Lanjran Choche & MORLITA Quan

Machinima By NikoleX Moonwall

 THIN CITIES 1

Isaura, city of the thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep, subterranean

lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig long vertical holes in the

ground, they succeed in drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no

farther. Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an

invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the

sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock's calcareous sky.

Consequently two forms of religion exist in Isaura.

The city's gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the black

lake that feeds the underground streams. According to others, the gods live in the

buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the

wells, in the revolving pulleys, in the windlasses of the norias, in the pump

handles, in the blades of the windmills that draw the water up from the drillings,

in the trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs perched on

stilts over the roofs, in the slender arches of the aqueducts, in all the columns

of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, the drains, all the way up to the

weathercocks that surmount the airy scaffolding of Isaura, a city that moves

entirely upwards.

Esmeralda

By Rebeca Bashly

Machinima Spiral Silverstar

 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.