In Invisible Cities Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice. As Gore Vidal wrote 'Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.'
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- 'Of all the Italian post-war novelists, Italo Calvino is the adventurer. He glitters, impersonal, brilliant and lasting' Financial Times
- 'Whole chapters of unforced poetic prose in which insight and fantasy are perfectly matched-an exquisite world' Observer
- 'Invisible Cities' is perhaps his most beautiful work-the artist seems to have made peace with the tension between man's ideas of the many and the one' New York Review of Books