The Travels of Marco Polo—tales told by the Venetian explorer to Italian romance writer Rustichello da Pisa—purportedly describes in great detail Polo’s encounter with “ The East,” a place in the medieval European mind as alien and fantastical as the interstellar realms of science fiction. Like other travel narratives of the period (notably the spurious Travels of Sir John Mandeville Polo’s stories mixed accurate geographical and cultural information with folklore, myth, and Orientalist misapprehension. While the appearance of monsters and marvels seems capricious to the modern reader, these elements may have felt almost mundane to Polo’s contemporaries. Or maybe not. After all, the Italian title of Polo’s travelogue— Il Milione—may refer to Polo’s reputation as the teller of “a million” lies. But let us leave the puzzles of authenticity to historians. As readers, we get lost in these fascinating romances because the worlds they describe are both so strange yet so unsettlingly familiar. Medieval travelogues like Polo’s open up the possibility of fairy kingdoms with outlandish customs thriving almost within reach. These tales of strange and unknown lands were, after all, prominent inspiration for C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books. ( Listen to the Chronicles of Narnia in a free audio format here). For grown-up readers, no author better evokes the uncanny geopolitics of the medieval imagination than Italo Calvino, whose Invisible Cities imagines Polo’s supposed journey to the imperial seat of Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. In Calvino’s novel—more a collection of prose-poems— Polo regales Khan with his accounts of 55 exotic cities, while the busy emperor’s functionaries come and go. “ At some point,” says author Eric Weiner, “you realize that Calvino is not talking about cities at all, not in the way we normally think of the word. Calvino’s cities—like all cities, really—are constructed.
Enter the characters you see below Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies. Type the characters you see in this image: Try different image Conditions of Use Privacy Policy ©, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.
The medieval travelogue presents present-day writers and artists with an abundance of material. Written in an age when the boundaries between fiction and non- were not so sharply drawn, early explorers and sailors had little compunction about embellishing their tales with exaggerations and outright lies. Travelers circulated stories of giants and monsters and credulous readers back home swallowed them whole. Well, sometimes. In the case of the most famed medieval traveler, Marco Polo, scholars have debated whether Il Milione—one of the titles of a narrative based on his accounts—refers to a family nickname or to Polo’s reputation for telling “a million lies.” But whether Polo told the truth or not hardly mattered to Italo Calvino, who found in the explorer’s colorful tales just the inspiration he needed for his 1972 novel Invisible Cities. More a series of vignettes than a narrative, the book consists of chapter after chapter of Polo describing for Kublai Khan the various cities he encountered on his travels, each one more fantastic and magical than the last. “ Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says,” Calvino tells us in his introduction, “but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.” As readers, we too listen with rapt attention to curious stories of cities like Olinda, which “grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring” and Eusapia, where “the inhabitants have constructed an identical copy of their city, underground,” so that the dead can “continue their former activities.” Playing on the bizarre nature of travelers’ tales and the imaginative excesses of exotic romances, Calvino’s novel abounds in delightful architectural absurdities and puzzling allegories, almost demanding to be.
Download Now