Marco Polo makes a leap into the unknown

Book club choice Calvino’s 1972 work is a delight – and still relevant, says Charlotte Runcie

The Italian writer Italo Calvino is best known for If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, his 1979 postmodernist masterpiece of meta-narrative. Yet he was also a master of poetic works whose beauty and intellectual rigour inspired writers including David Mitchell, Ali Smith and Salman Rushdie.

The most exciting of his books is probably Invisible Cities, written in 1972 and structured as a surreal series of prose-poem histories of fantastical cities woven into an imagined conversation between the Venetian explorer Marco Polo and the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. Each city has a female name and its own identity.

There is “Octavia, the spider-web city”, situated in a net hung over a void between two steep mountains, its inhabitants balanced precariously among “rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water”. There is also “Isidora”, where “the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made – where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third”.

The book is an imaginative delight. But there is a twist. We realise quickly that each city could be describing the same impossible Italian town, and the poetry with which the revelation emerges is transformative.

It will make you see the next city you visit with fresh eyes.

“Reading Calvino,” Salman Rushdie has said, “you’re constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you’ve never thought of it before.”