I couldn’t see more than two feet in front of my face. My relationship had just exploded, and I was very depressed I only knew one person in town, and she was in rapturous love with her new boyfriend. I was working a tedious job at my college over one summer, living in a strange dorm room with no internet. However, while Isidora nurtured the traveler’s youthful desires and dreams, he arrives to it as old man and can only contemplate desire as a distant memory.Sometimes I like to think that Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities saved my life, but it might be more accurate to say it saved my mind. Isidora is the definition of progress, with its cutting-edge inventions such as “perfect telescopes and violins,” and it is also an abundant, luxurious place, filled with a surplus of attractive women (7). The city of Isidora corresponds to the traveler’s dreams of a city when he was riding “a long time through wild regions” (7). However, a visitor who arrives on a particular September evening will feel envy towards others who believe that they have experienced an evening identical to this and thought they were happy. These will be “familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities” (6). The narrator describes the city of Diomira’s wonders, such as silver domes, bronze statues, and lead-paved streets. However, disenchanted with his colonial project and the “sense of emptiness” that arises from conquering lands without understanding them, Polo’s accounts awaken his curiosity and the sense that something worthwhile can be salvaged from the wreckage of empire (5).
Kublai Khan the Tartar emperor does not fully believe the Venetian explorer Marco Polo’s account of the cities he has visited.
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