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Invisible Cities
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Invisible Cities

novel by Calvino
Also known as: “Le città invisibili”
Written and fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
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History

Invisible Cities, novel by Italo Calvino, published in 1972 in Italian as Le città invisibili. It consists of a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which the former describes a series of wondrous, surreal cities in the khan’s domain. Each city is characterized by a unique quality or concept. The interplay of reality and imagination and the craft of fiction itself are among the work’s underlying issues.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.