Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" 

Calvino's "Invisible Cities" is seemingly surreal: Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn relax at ease in the Imperial gardens while Polo describes some of the cities he has seen in his travels.

The book has very short passages of one or two pages, either with the story of Polo and Kublai, or with the stories of the cities. The city stories are disconnected there is no thread of a narrative framework and so the book was designed to be dipped into rather than read through.. The cities are fantastic in the literal sense: they are high above the ground on stilts, or composed of water pipes, or reflected in a sister city of the dead buried beneath the living city. 

It reflects the way I see the City of Venice and that is why I’m presenting it at Retrò the project taking place in the gardens outside the boundary walls of the Biennale pavillions on the Island of Sant’Elena during the whole period of the Biennal di Architettura 2006 exhibition (september 6th - november 19th).