Kublai Khan has realized that his immense empire has grown so vast that it can never be explored completely. But Marco Polo, the Venetian traveler, describes for him the cities he has visited. Fifty-five impossible cities across eleven thematic categories—each a meditation on memory, desire, signs, death, and the invisible architectures of human experience.
Begin ReadingNavigate Through the Invisible Architecture
Click or press SPACE to fly through the cities.
Avoid the city towers and see how far you can travel.
Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili) was published in 1972 by Italian writer Italo Calvino. The book is structured as a conversation between the aging emperor Kublai Khan and the young Venetian merchant Marco Polo. Polo describes fifty-five cities he has visited on his travels through Khan's vast empire, but each city is impossible, fantastic, a meditation on some aspect of human experience.
The cities are organized into eleven thematic categories: Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, Cities and Signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities and Eyes, Cities and Names, Cities and the Dead, Cities and the Sky, Continuous Cities, and Hidden Cities. Each category appears five times throughout the book, interwoven in a precise mathematical structure.
This website translates Calvino's book into a digital medium while honoring its original structure and spirit. The minimalist, architectural approach reflects the book's systematic organization and its preoccupation with structure, form, and the act of describing the indescribable.
Original Text: Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (1972)
English Translation: William Weaver (1974)
Typeface: Helvetica Neue
Course: Book to Website, Washington University in St. Louis, Fall 2025