Invisible Cities

The character of Marco Polo is based on the historical figure of the same name who lived from 1254-1324. A merchant and an explorer, Polo was from the Italian city of Venice but traveled across Asia on a route that would later be known as the Silk Road. Polo grew famous for his service to Kublai Khan and for the documentation of his travels in the 1298 manuscript The Travels of Marco Polo.

Like the real-life Marco Polo, who exaggerated the drama and intrigue of the cities he visited in in his accounts, Calvino’s Polo has a flexible relationship to the truth. From the outset, Khan “does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions” (5). However, the vividness of Polo’s descriptions of place and people strike a note of authenticity, especially when contrasted with the dry factual accounts of other ambassadors. Thus, though Polo is a time-traveling inventor who spins fantastical tales of basilisks and nymphs, he speaks to greater, more universal truths about civilization, empire, and travel. Whereas Khan relates to the cities as a conqueror, Polo experiences them as a peripatetic wanderer, contrasting the fixedness of the city’s inhabitants with his own constant change. Still, while Polo is aware that he has seen much of the known world, as he travels on he realizes that there are increasingly more aspects of life that he has not experienced. Paradoxically, this is accompanied by a sense of traveler’s fatigue and the cliché that places lose their freshness and power to inspire on repeat visits, or as the traveler grows older. For example, by the time he reaches the city of his desires, Isidora which “contained him as a young man,” he is old and can only sit with the old men “and watch the young go by,” his own desires “already memories” (7). Given that all the cities he describes contain a seed of Venice, his city of origin and the one he longs to return to, there is a melancholy sense that he wishes to be home. When he fears that in describing Venice in words he may lose the purity of his images of the city, he expresses the fear of losing his identity as a Venetian and instead becoming a diffuse citizen of the world.

Still, while Khan seeks for much of the narrative to fix meaning and accuses Polo of being a peddler of dreams and illusions, Polo insists on leaving meaning open. He emphasizes the contrasts and duality inherent in each city, thus allowing for the possibility of endless narratives and interpretations. He seeks to unfix Khan’s colonialist project, with its notions of controlling people and meaning, even as he purports to serve him. By the end of the narrative, when Polo is advising Khan to search for those who have resisted the corruption of civilization and give them more influences, he emerges as the stronger of the two men.