Invisible Cities

So important for thinking about the rich layers of life around us, our frailties, how we question and how we find meaning.

Red

Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose... The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island

Jeanette Winterson

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

The most beautiful of his books throws up ideas, allusions, and breathtaking imaginative insights on almost every page. Each time he returns from his travels, Marco Polo is invited by Kublai Khan to describe the cities he has visited-Although he makes Marco Polo summon up many cities for the Khan's imagination to feed on, Calvino is describing only one city in this book. Venice, that decaying heap of incomparable splendour, still stands as substantial evidence of man's ability to create something perfect out of chaos

Paul Bailey, Times Literary Supplement

Of all the Italian post-war novelists, Italo Calvino is the adventurer. He glitters, impersonal, brilliant and lasting

Financial Times