by Letizia Modena
Routledge, 267 pp., $146.00 ($99.75 ebook)
DAN TURELLO
“If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell you how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks.” It is one of Marco Polo’s accounts to the Kublai Khan, from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The Kublai Khan, wrote Calvino in the introduction, was viewing an empire that was “an endless, formless ruin,” in which “corruption’s...
Read more about Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis