Invisible Cities Read online

  Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.

  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.”

  And 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. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. 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.”

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446414279

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  Copyright © Giulio Einaudi editore, s.p.a. 1972

  English translation copyright © Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1974

  Italo Calvino has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published in Italy as Le città invisibili

  This volume first published in Great Britain by Secker & Warburg in 1974

  www.vintage-books.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library