Editing Invisible Cities (section)

==Historical background==

''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 dynasty|Yuan China]] ([[Mongol Empire]]). The original 13th-century travelogue shares with Calvino's novel the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities Polo claimed to have visited, along with descriptions of the city's inhabitants, notable [[international trade|imports and exports]], and stories by Polo about the region.

''Invisible Cities'' is an example of Calvino's use of [[combinatory literature]], and shows influences of [[semiotics]] and [[Structural linguistics|structuralism]]. In the novel, the reader finds themselves playing a game with the author, wherein they must find the patterns hidden in the book. The book has nine chapters, but there are also hidden divisions within the book: each of the 55 cities belongs to one of eleven thematic groups (explained below). The reader can therefore play with the book's structure, and choose to follow one group or another, rather than reading the book in chronological chapters. At a 1983 conference held at Columbia University, Calvino himself stated that there is no definite end to ''Invisible Cities'' because "this book was made as a [[polyhedron]], and it has conclusions everywhere, written along all of its edges."<ref>{{Cite web|last=Elpis|first=Bruno|date=2016|title=Le Città Invisibili di Italo Calvino|url=https://www.brunoelpis.it/recensioni/770-le-citta-invisibili-di-italo-calvino-qlibri|website=Bruno Elpis}}</ref>