Invisible cities
He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories ( Invisible cities, Italo Calvino)
C&M 3
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, writter in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. (Zaira,city of high bastions, Italo Calvino, Invisible cities)
C&M 4
Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its successions of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and windows in the houses, through nothing in them possesses a special beauty or rarity. Zora's secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced..... But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintergrated, desappeared. The earth has forgotten her. (Zora, Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)
C&S 2
Zirma, The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind... Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist. (Zirma, Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)
C&M 5
In Maurilia, the traveler in invited to visit the city and at the same time, to examine some old post cards that show it as it used to be....If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it ti the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits...If Masurilia had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was. Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse that the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depiict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.
C&D 4
In the center of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.....On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room both for the bigm stone Fedora and the little Foderas in glass globed. Not because they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.
C&E 1
The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake, ..... thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the flutings and juttings of the facades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms.....At times the mirror increases a thing;s value, at times debies it. Not everything that seems valuable above the mirror maintains its force when mirrored. The twin cities are not ewual, becoause nothing that exists or happens in Valdrada is symmetrical: every face and gesture is answered, from the mirror, by a face and gesture inverted, point by point. The two Valdradas live for each other, their eyes interlocked; but there is no love between them.
TC
Octavia, the spider-web city. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bount to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past: farther down you can glimpse the chasm's bed. This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below,......Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants is less uncertain that in other cities. They Know the net will last only so long.