Calvino built his cities partly inspired by a literary source: Frye’s idea of the city (and the anti-city) as resulting from human projection of either desire or fear onto the inorganic world (ch. 1). According to Frye’s Anatomy of
Criticism, when the mineral world is transformed by desire, the transfor-
mation generates paradisiacal imagery; when by fear, infernal imagery. Calvino noted throughout Frye’s now-classic study a confl uence of para- disiacal, apocalyptic imagery and lightness. One paragraph left an espe- cially profound impression on Calvino, who would later reproduce it in his critical review of Anatomy: “to this category also belong geometrical and architectural images: the tower and the winding stairway . . . , the ladder . . . the ascending spiral or cornucopia, the ‘stately pleasure dome’ that Kublai Khan decreed . . . ” (Frye, Anatomy 145). According to Frye, such architecture is one of the forms of the archetypal symbol of the city in its apocalyptic-paradisiacal, and therefore utopian, aspect. Human utopian desire, projected onto the mineral world, shapes it into ascend- ing forms.25 In Calvino’s novel, the conversations take place precisely in
approximate Frye’s catalog of images. It is an architettura ascendente, or “soaring architecture” (Calvino, “Literature as Projection” 53), built from images that refl ect a complete or in-progress elevation (towers, staircases, pinnacles, spires, vertical pipes, etc.) or, in Calvino’s broadening of the concept, dematerialization. These ascending forms bring the Canadian lit- erary historian’s archetypes of literature into harmony with the demand for lightness in the city of the future issued repeatedly by the vanguard in urban planning and design, while echoing the principle of dematerializa- tion embodied by Melotti’s oeuvre.
The sculptures that had the most profound effect on Calvino’s conceptu- alization of lightness were Melotti’s so-called threadlike sculptures (sculture
Figure 4.6 Fausto Melotti, Il circo (Circus), 1965. Courtesy
fi liformi) from the ’60s and early ’70s, which are “almost Calder-like mobiles”
(Lodi 149).26 Among these are threadlike fi gures, rarefi ed and suspended
compositions of basic materials like sheets, spheres, tin, thread, iron wire, veils, and scraps of fabric. A look at the Melottian emblems reveals thin little rods—what Calvino called “fl amingo legs”—supporting wiry fl oors that in turn support little sticks with symbols on top, and even spiderwebs of wire, lacework in sheer fabric or fl imsy metal grates, and crisscrossing little chains. These sculptures are described as “drawings materialized in space, with just a touch of vibration in the light scaffolding—as if they were being moved by the wind” (Bacile and Melotti 59) (Fig. 4.6).
Regarding what is called here Melotti’s lightness, Renato Barilli has acutely observed that what defi nes and distinguishes him from other abstract sculptors is his reductive or entropic gesture toward his building materials: a process of dematerialization (qtd. in Bacile 35). Barilli’s analysis is also applicable to some cities in Invisible Cities whose potential mass is rendered so mobile and light that urban space becomes invisible (or mental) space. Melotti chooses plaster and metal, which are the most solid materials imag- inable, Barilli notes, and “works miracles to thin them out, to render them diaphanous, positioned to leave traces more than anything else, to insinuate a landscape of forces and currents otherwise invisible” (qtd. in Bacile 35).
This Melottian lightness—the tendency to thin out or disembody an over- saturated reality—assumes the same hues in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, espe- cially, but not exclusively, in the so-called thin cities. Calvino had defi ned these (in a Fryean salute) as a subspecies of the category “cities and desire,” which is to say, a poetic transfi guration of the subjective experience of desire linked to the city.27 Like an air bubble that fl oats outward and upward, Isaura
inaugurates the levitation that characterizes the thin cities. Just like the verti- cal spatial city conceived by visionary architects, Isaura is put into motion through the rapid circulation of its vertical axis. The city’s gods, according to the novel, rise from the wells to enliven the scene with a sprightly and joyous movement, vertical and light, that recalls also Melotti’s sculptures:
In the buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the wells, in the revolving pulleys, in the windlasses of the norias, in the pump handles, in the blades of the windmills that draw the water up from the drillings, in the trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs perched on stilts over the roofs, in the slender arches of the aqueducts, in all the columns of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, all the way up to the weathercocks that surmount the airy scaffoldings of Isaura, a city that moves entirely upward. (Invisible Cities 20)
Although the architectural features of Isaura recall a broad swath of Melotti’s sculptural production, Calvino’s city is almost certainly a ver- bal rendering of Gli dei (case, alberi, nuvole) (The Gods [Houses, Trees,
About Isaura, “a city that moves entirely upwards,” Calvino emphasized its distribution on different planes or levels, “perched on stilts” and con- nected by “vertical pipes,” all of which unequivocally locate it within the panorama of the aerial architecture of spatial cities. The city’s gods emerge from an underground level and move upward traversing the “airy scaf- foldings,” all the way up to the highest level of the city—that of the sky. In Melotti’s sculpture, we see a delicate loom of brass with a slender and fl eet- ing appearance, truly aerial scaffolding, comprised of a pentagram of thin horizontal planes on which houses, trees, or clouds stand with grace and stylization. On the second highest plane, a thin sheet of material resembling
Figure 4.7 Fausto Melotti, Gli dei (case, alberi, nuv- ole) (Gods [Houses, Trees, Clouds]), 1968. Courtesy of
wrinkled fabric speaks of clouds. Above the clouds, three slender tubular fi gures (the gods?), spiral upwards into the infi nite heavens. Again, Melot- ti’s sculpture dates from 1968, only four years before the publication of
Invisible Cities.
Earlier in his career, in Castello dei destini incrociati (1969) Calvino had described “a suspended city . . . , a city fl oating on waves or on clouds, and carried by two winged putti. It was a city whose rooftops touched the vault of the sky” (525). Then, in La Taverna dei destini incrociati (1973), he saw on a tarot card a city come to life with “countless towers and spires and minarets and domes stretching beyond its walls” (553). The city is “bal- anced atop a pyramid, which might also be the top of an enormous tree: it is a city suspended between the higher branches like a bird’s nest, with its foundations dangling like the aerial roots of certain plants that grow on top of other plants” (554). In the 1972 novel, Isaura launches the cluster of cit- ies suspended in the sky, the thin cities through which Calvino delivered his
Figure 4.8 Fausto Melotti, Da Shakespeare (After Shake- speare), 1977. Courtesy of Archivio Fausto Melotti.
credo of lightness: Zenobia, Sofronia, Armilla, and Octavia. These urban icons manifest explicitly the features of lightness most indebted (visually speaking) to spatial architecture and to Melotti’s architectonic sculpture.
In Zenobia, readers encounter the highly elevated pile-dwellings, the many “platforms and balconies placed on stilts” that recall many of Melot- ti’s sculptures as well as the principles of visionary urbanism: “Now I shall tell of the city of Zenobia,” Calvino writes, “which is wonderful in this fashion: though set on dry terrain it stands on high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging sidewalks, surmounted by cone-roofed belvederes, barrels storing water, weather vanes, jutting pulleys, and fi sh poles, and cranes” (35). Indeed, Zenobia’s inhabitants are so very satisfi ed with their city’s confi guration that in their imagination it coincides perfectly with their “vision of a happy life”: it is one of those cities that “through the years and changes continue to give their form to desires” (35) (Fig. 4.8).
Armilla, with its skeleton of tubes and pipes, a city made of webbed ver- tical lines, recalls the yearning for dematerialization, aerial elevation, and communication and transportation systems of the spatial design projects by visionary architects in the late ’60s. In La cité de l’an 2000, Ragon recalled Konrad Wachsmann’s observation: “supports will disappear almost com- pletely, and when they do exist, one will no longer notice them. Walls, win- dows, and doors also will undergo profound transformations. I can imagine that there will be nothing other than transparent, opaque, or mobile surfaces” (La cité 131). “The fact remains,” we read of Calvino’s invisible city Armilla, “that it has no walls, no ceilings, no fl oors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the fl oors should be: a forest of pipes” (49). Like one of the visionary architects’ spatial cities, Armilla tends towards transparency: “against the sky a lavabo’s white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs” (49).
At the same time, Armilla could be the verbal rendering of City (Città [1963]), one of Melotti’s threadlike, or fi ligree, sculptures (Fig. 4.9). Armilla’s lightness is vivacious and playful: “in the sun, the threads of water fanning from the showers glisten, the jets on the taps, the spurts, the splashes, the sponges’ suds” (49). Like Melotti’s sculpture Città, Calvino’s invisible city Armilla is the fi ligree city par excellence. In the novel, Kublai Khan is able to discern, as quoted earlier, “the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing” in Marco Polo’s accounts. Armilla is, moreover, the city that survived destruction: seeing Armilla, “you would think,” Calvino writes, that the urban “hydraulic systems, indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of the ter- mites” (49). Lightness, in this context, is not only aesthetic—not merely a question of form; it is ethical, even ontological: it enables the city to endure, to survive destruction.
Octavia is a “spider-web city” that swings over an abyss, tied with ropes to two mountain tops, its precarious situation opposed to earthly gravity. “If you choose to believe me, good,” the visionary traveler says of Calvino’s city, “now I will tell you how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks . . . , below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet” (75). A strik- ing parallel may be discerned between Calvino’s city and Rottier’s city on
Figure 4.9 Fausto Melotti, Città (City), 1963. Courtesy
cables: a human habitat composed of habitable cells suspended by cables stretched between mountains and arranged “in a spiderweb fashion” (Ragon, La cité 128) (Figs. 4.10 and 4.11). At the center of the spider’s web, the visionary architect Rottier placed the “brain” of the city, that is, the machinery that moved the cables at the end of the season to gather the inhabitable cells to be repainted and put in storage until the next season, when the various cells would be “regenerated” on the cables (“bloom” on the cables, it was said, because they looked like leaves).
Octavia is also vividly reminiscent of Maymont’s spiderweb design proj- ects (Ragon, La cité 190) of villages hanging on cables “against an abrupt falaise” (Ragon, Les cités 203) and also of the Ville Pyramide, by the same
Figure 4.10 Guy Rottier, Cité de vacances sur fi l (Resort Town on Cables), 1964–65. A spiderweb city. Courtesy
architect: “a pylon that supports an elastic trellis [in the shape of a pyra- mid], made up of cables, from which are suspended the singular cells or the artifi cial fl oors” (Simoncini 54; see fi g. 4.5 Villes suspendues). In the mid- dle of this gigantic 3-D spiderweb, there are rooms, theaters, businesses, and schools of “light and diverse shapes,” made of “colorful scintillating materials,” situated on various levels, as Alexandre Persitz explained: “the structure is even lighter and more transparent than that which the engineer Eiffel could dream up in 1887” (qtd. in Ragon, Les cités 132). This trans- parent Mount Saint Michel would be 125 meters high and accommodate fi fteen thousand to twenty thousand inhabitants.
A third, and complementary, inspiration for Octavia can be found in Melotti’s sculpture Il sacco (1969), a sculpture composed of a tall, slender trellis holding up in the air a transparent gauze with some little balls inside (Fig. 4.12). Again, it is necessary to remember that the lightness of the urban icon is not exclusively formal. Calvino develops the intrinsic potential of the image in ethical and ontological terms that suggest an approach to life: “sus- pended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long” (75).28 With Octa-
via, the last in Calvino’s series of thin cities, lightness splits off to form many lightnesses, reverberating in the webs of strings in the sky that signify the relations between inhabitants in Ersilia, which becomes a veritable spatial city, a “labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain” (76), on “long fl amingo legs” (77) that sustain the city of Baucis high in the air (Fig. 4.13).
Figure 4.11 Guy Rottier, Village Suspendu (Suspended Village), 1965. Courtesy of
Figure 4.12 Fausto Melotti, Il sacco (Sack), 1969.
The cities in chapter 5, to which Octavia, Ersilia, Baucis, Leandra, and Melania all belong, embody lightness more than any others in the novel. Evidence for this claim is to be found in the preface, in which Calvino limits himself to a single observation about his urban icons from the perspective of the visual, but he does not use the word visual: “as a reader among oth- ers, I can say that in Chapter 5, which develops at the very heart of the book a theme of lightness strangely associated with the theme of the city, there are some passages that I think are better as visionary evidence, and perhaps these threadlike shapes (the ‘Thin cities’ and others) are the most luminous area in the entire book” (Presentazione xi).29 This observation
offers a hermeneutical key to understanding the novel as much more than a postmodern experimentation with literary forms, for it places lightness in the foreground and marries it to the visionary, or the transcendent visual.
Figure 4.13 Fausto Melotti, detail of Il sacco (Sack),
Such “visionary evidence” is at its best in the aforementioned Baucis, the aerial city that on luminous days projects a pierced shadow onto the foliage below. Numerous scholars and artists have been intrigued by this city of absence, the invisible city par excellence, because the traveler cannot see the city unless he looks upward, “yet he has arrived” (Invisible Cities 77).30 Hov-
ering over empty space, the city is suspended over the clouds, accessible only by towering ladders. The inhabitants appear to feel nostalgic for the ground below, or perhaps they are captivated by what the earth is without them occupying (hiding) it or by the contemplation of the space where they could be and are not: “there are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and tele- scopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence” (Invisi-
ble Cities 77). Calvino himself referred to his life away from Italy through the
image of Baucis, the metaphor of an observation point that allows a deeper understanding of oneself by refl ecting on one’s absence: “among the Invisible
Cities there is one on stilts, and its inhabitants watch their own absence from
on high. Maybe to understand who I am I have to observe a point where I could be but am not” (Hermit in Paris 189).31
Because a number of scholars have read the image of Baucis as a projec- tion of Calvino’s distancing—and at times alienated—approach to reality, readers have been conditioned to think of it as an abandoned or destroyed city spied by distant inhabitants with telescopes. And yet, this city at the very core of the novel is not an empty space on the ground, but rather, an elevated city. Polo is very clear on this point: “nothing of the city touches the earth expect those long fl amingo legs on which it rests” (77). Suspended in the sky aloft long, slender stilts, Baucis takes on a radically different— not socially distant but, instead, socially engaged—meaning when it is read in the context of Calvino’s relationship to visionary architecture and urban planning in the ’60s and early ’70s. The inhabitants who contemplate with spyglasses and telescopes their own absence from the ground leave the ground free, achieving the wholesale inversion of urban conventions and expectations promoted by the creators of spatial cities. Baucis’s inhabitants are altogether satisfi ed: “having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down” (77). In the Ovidian myth, as a reward for wel- coming two disguised strangers (Zeus and Hermes), an old couple named Baucis and Philemon are elevated above the level of their neighbors’ selfi sh- ness to the summit of a mountain. The high elevation of the new dwell- ing place spares them from the fl ood that sweeps through the land below. Equally, Calvino’s Baucis is an alternative locus of hospitality and renewed perception; it is an elsewhere or otherwise, in the Gabellonean sense.
At the core of Invisible Cities, then, there are various manifestations of lightness, the founding principle of a future human habitat. The “vision- ary evidence” of lightness denotes the other cities of the “most luminous
area of the book.” With Ersilia, Calvino erases the physicality of the city in order to restore the isolated image of the relationships connecting inhabit- ants to each other that are represented as fl oating webs of strings (76). In Leandra, Calvino projects lightness, this time Lucretian, into his visionary rendition of the quintessential nature of the city: Leandra’s protagonists are a multitude of imperceptible gods like moving atoms, “too tiny to be seen and too numerous to be counted” (78).32 They live alongside the living
and participate in everyday life, the “true essence” (79) of the city that will remain through time. These invisible gods are light, mobile, and vectors of messages like the spiritelli of Cavalcanti’s poetry that Calvino celebrated among his examples of lightness in Six Memos: “if you listen carefully, especially at night, you can hear them in the houses of Leandra, murmur- ing steadily, interrupting one another, huffi ng, bantering, amid ironic, sti- fl ed laughter” (79). Melania, the last city in chapter 5, continues Leandra’s essential fractioning into little discrete bits whose extreme mobility forms a combinatory of relationships.
The union of a longed-for lightness and an urban thematics is mani- fested beyond chapter 5 of the novel, as Calvino opposes opaqueness,