In order that the cascade sequence terminate (the book of cities is not infinite!) Calvino, in chapter 9, truncates the diagonal cascades in steps: Laudomia through Raissa is a cascade of four cities, followed by cascades of three, two, and one, necessitating ten cities in the final chapter. These five-city cascades are displaced by one theme column to the right as one proceeds to the next chapter.
Inner chapters (2-8 inclusive) have diagonal cascades of five cities (e.g. Equivalently, it is symmetric against 180 degree rotations about Baucis. The pattern of cities is symmetric with respect to inversion about that center. The matrix of cities has a central element (Baucis). Each column has five entries, rows only one, so there are fifty-five cities in all. The matrix of eleven column themes and fifty-five subchapters (ten rows in chapters 1 and 9, five in all others) shows some interesting properties. The descriptions of the cities lie between these two sections. In each of the nine chapters, there is an opening section and a closing section, narrating dialogues between the Khan and Marco. The table below lists the cities in order of appearance, along with the group they belong to: He moves back and forth between the groups, while moving down the list, in a rigorous mathematical structure. The cities are divided into eleven thematic groups of five each: Over the nine chapters, Marco describes a total of fifty-five cities, all women's names. At a 1983 conference held at Columbia University, Calvino himself stated that there is no definite end to Invisible Cities because "this book was made as a polyhedron, and it has conclusions everywhere, written along all of its edges." Structure The reader can therefore play with the book's structure, and choose to follow one group or another, rather than reading the book in chronological chapters. The book has nine chapters, but there is also hidden divisions within the book: each of the 55 cities belongs to one of eleven thematic groups (explained below). In the novel, the reader finds themselves playing a game with the author, wherein they must find the patterns hidden in the book. Invisible Cities is an example of Calvino's use of combinatory literature, and shows clear influences of semiotics and structuralism. The original 13th-century travelogue shares with Calvino's novel the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities Polo claimed to have visited, along with descriptions of the city's inhabitants, notable imports and exports, and whatever interesting tales Polo had heard about the region. Invisible Cities deconstructs an archetypal example of the travel literature genre, The Travels of Marco Polo, which depicts the journey of the famed Venetian merchant across Asia and in Yuan China ( Mongol Empire). Polo's response: "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice." In one key exchange in the middle of the book, Kublai prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has never mentioned directly-his hometown. These interludes between the two characters are no less poetically constructed than the cities, and form a framing device that plays with the natural complexity of language and stories.
Short dialogues between Kublai and Polo are interspersed every five to ten cities discussing these topics. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as parables or meditations on culture, language, time, memory, death, or the general nature of human experience. The book is framed as a conversation between the elderly and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire, and Polo. Palimpsests summon residues from the past that linger, layer over, and complicate presentist conceptions of the city.The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by an explorer, Marco Polo. A palimpsest, derived from the Greek palin for “again” and psao for “scrape,” denotes a written surface where remnants of prior writings, etched into the parchment, are still discernible. The city, here, does not disclose its past through linear narrative speech but holds the past as a repository of traces, as material palimpsest that bears the vestiges of its former lives. “The city does not tell its past,” he writes, “but contains it like the lines of a hand, written 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” (11). In a brief passage from Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino invokes the city as an archive.
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