Invisible Cities deconstructs an archetypal example of the travel literature genre, The Travels of Marco Polo, which depicts the eponymous Venetian merchant's journey across Asia and in Yuan China ( Mongol Empire). Polo replied "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."
In the middle of the book, Kublai asks about a city Polo never mentioned, his hometown of Venice. These interludes between the two characters are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories. Short dialogues between Kublai and Polo are interspersed every five to ten cities discussing the same topics. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as commentary on culture, language, time, memory, death, or human experience generally, interspersed every few cities with short dialogues between Kublai and Polo on the same subjects. The book is framed as a conversation between the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, and Marco Polo. It was published in Italy in 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore. Invisible Cities ( Italian: Le città invisibili) is a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino.
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