Niewidzialne miasta – Michal Ajvaz czyta Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino’s Invisible cities (1972) is a fictional prosaic work which tries to consider a essential attributes of a modern urbanization. The hero, Marco Polo, shows his interlocutor, Kublai khan, some imaginary cities which are regarded as the allegorical examples of the anthropological, semiotic, metaphysical, architectonic or mythical aspects of the city as a historical, philosophical and cultural phenomenon. Calvino however stresses the individual character of the described places. Michal Ajvaz’s work titled 55 cities is a attempt of a new arrangement of a Calvino’s topical matter and reconstructing it into a universal model of the city itself. According to him the main features which decide about the essence of urbanization are memory and desire. First of them defines the past od the city – the second creates its future.