‘the shards of the original splendour that had been saved, by adapting them to more obscure needs, were again shifted. Now a city of abundance, is has been rebuilt and remade over its long history until: In ‘Cities and Names 4’, we have an example of a truly postmodern society in the city of Clarice. There is a city where everything is replaced with a brand new version every day, and where the waste of previous days mounts up outside the city borders, reaching farther and farther out towards the waste of other cities, their collective detritus threatening to overpower them all. The cities become places of environmental concern, places where the inhabitants are disconnected, alienated, driven to distraction by rampant consumerism. Just as the Polo/Khan dialogue becomes destabilised, the fantastic cities in turn become more real, and more uncomfortably contemporary. This is one of a number of examples of intertextuality within this book, foremost among those being The Travels of Marco Polo, which has some interesting correlations with Calvino’s text, particularly in relation to the style of the narration. Are they really there, talking together in the luxury of the palace: the emperor and the traveller from a distant land? Or are they just two homeless beggars, telling made up stories as they pick through the city’s rubbish? The potential absurdity of this situation clearly invokes writers like Samuel Beckett, whose play Waiting for Godot is centred around two homeless vagabonds who play language games to pass the time as they wait, seemingly endlessly, pointlessly, and repetitively for a character named Godot. But it is not long before this situation breaks down, and we begin to question Khan and Polo, as they, in fact, begin to question themselves. But what of Khan and Polo? At the beginning at least, we are asked to suspend our disbelief for the duration of the dialogues the stories, or the fictions, are in the cities, not in the developing scenario between the characters. From the start, we are sure that these are cities of the imagination, dream cities, impossible cities, invisible cities they are not real, and they are not presented as real within the book. The cities themselves are incredible from a city made up of spiders’ webs suspended over an abyss, to cities that model themselves on the patterns of the stars above. In Invisible Cities, Calvino relies upon the fabulousness of Polo’s tales, and the literary heritage they engendered, to question the reality not just of the cities he is describing, but also the reality of the framing dialogue. This travelogue has sparked many other literary projects, such as the famous poem ‘Kubla Khan’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kafka’s The Emperor’s Message, and of course Calvino’s Invisible Cities. These writings followed Polo’s own oral accounts of his travels through Asia between 12, and his time in Khan’s court. There is a rich literary tradition following from The Travels of Marco Polo themselves, which were written down by romance writer Rustichello da Pisa, who was imprisoned with Polo in Genoa. But their characterisations and the characterisation of Khan’s empire are used more for their mythology and the history of fictions that have sprung up around them, than for any historical grounding. Marco Polo was an Italian merchant traveller who lived during the late 13th/early 14th Century, and Kublai Khan was a mogul emperor, the grandson of Genghis Khan, and the founder of the Yuan dynasty following his conquest of China. These characters are of course based on real people, and a real relationship. All this is framed within a simple dialogue between two characters: Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. Invisible Cities is a collection of imaginative renderings of various cities, which also operate as meditations on things like reality, truth, language, perspective, communication, and the myriad ways we experience the world. First published in Italian in 1972, with William Weaver’s English translation appearing in 1974, Invisible Cities numbers among his later works. He published a number of works during the latter half of the twentieth century and won a number of awards including the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement. Italo Calvino was an Italian writer associated with both neorealism and postmodernism.