Between the Visible and the Invisible: Calvino's Cities and Memory

Abstract

Seeing with the Mind's Eye: A Love-Poem to the CityIn his study on the origin and evolution of the city published in 1961, The City in History, Lewis Mumford asked "what is the city?How did it come into existence?. ..Will the city disappear or will the whole planet turn into a vast urban hive?" (3) An ambitious and erudite work, Mumford's book is a tribute to the city and, specifically, to its major, in fact central role in the history of Western civilization: 1 the role of setting a scenario for what Aristotle called the pursuit of the good life.While denouncing the alleged crisis of this crucial function, Mumford shows that knowing how cities have been thought and built in the past is an essential aspect of the collec- tive memory of a society: it is a resource that helps plan the urban life and spaces of the future.A decade or so later, in 1972, Calvino published Le città invisibili, a text that aspires to be more than just a Baedeker of fictional urban images.The reasons and questions that inspired the writing of Le città invisibili are similar to the concerns expressed by Mumford at the beginning of his study.In the preface to the 1983 Mondadori edition of Le città invisibili, Calvino reflects on the function(s) we assign to present-day urban spaces and suggests that awareness of the intimate link between the city and the good life risks disappearing from the collective memory of contemporary Western civilization: Che cosa è oggi la città, per noi?Penso d'aver scritto qualcosa come un ultimo poema d'amore alle città, nel momento in cui diventa sempre più In effect, The City in History is about a limited area of Western civilization.Mumford himself admits to this in the preface: "As in all my other studies of the city, I have confined myself as far as possible to cities and regions I am acquaint- ed with at first hand, and to data in which I have long been immersed.This has limited me to Western civilization, and even there I have been forced to leave out large significant tracts: namely, Spain and Latin America, Palestine, Eastern Europe, Soviet Russia.I regret these omissions; but since my method demands personal experience and observation, something unreplaceable by books, it would take another lifetime to make them good" (xi).

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