Despina City, Karina Puente Despina, Ricardo Bonachoĭespina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it. This said, it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. But what is certain is that if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines, with its pilings and its suspended stairways, a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first model.
No one remembers what need or command or desire drove Zenobia’s founders to give their city this form, and so there is no telling whether it was satisfied by the city as we see it today, which has perhaps grown through successive superimpositions from the first, now undecipherable plan. Now I shall tell of the city of Zenobia, which is wonderful in this fashion: although set on dry terrain it stands on high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging side-walks surmounted by cone-roofed belvederes, barrels storing water, weather vanes, jutting pulleys, and fish poles, and cranes. Zenobia City, Karina Puente Zenobia, Colleen Corradi Brannigan Zenobia, Maria Monsonet
#Invisible cities album free
Here are a few culled from the internet if you feel so moved, feel free to add your own favorites (or your own!) below. So, this Sunday being Italo Calvino’s birthday, it seems as good a time as any to share some of the treatments artists have given various cities from what is probably his most beloved book. Every once in a while, I’ll see some gorgeous image pop up in a search, and it will seem familiar to me somehow-when I click, I’ll find that it’s another vision of Octavia, or Zenobia, in one of its infinite possible permutations. But it isn’t only avid readers who are fans of Invisible Cities (though I’d wager a strong percentage of the novel’s fans are writers) many artists, designers, and architects have also taken inspiration from Calvino’s imaginary cityscapes and invented architectures-whether overtly or indirectly-and I frequently hear of this book being used in design and art classes of all levels. And I quickly figured out that other people like this book too.
#Invisible cities album series
I took Invisible Cities out of the library. I couldn’t report you many specific details from the book now-there’s not much story to speak of-but I remember the feeling of sitting in the grass and reading it, feeling the coldness of it, the sense of being sucked into another dimension, a series of images both dreamlike and exact, a pleasure simultaneously visceral and intellectual. 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. 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.
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