Calvino's Decoration of Chapters

As I was reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, I noticed the book is divided in six sections where every page contains Marco Polo’s description of the elements, design, and structure of different cities. At the beginning of every section an introduction between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan is present in order to guide the reader in the setting and situation of the story. After that, chapters with no more than 2 to 3 pages are labeled on the top right corner with names:

·         Cities and Memory

·         Cities and Desire

·         Cities and Signs

·         Thin Cities

·         Trading Cities

·         Cities and Eyes

·         Cities and Names

·         Cities and Dead

·         Cities and the Sky

·         Continuous Cities

·         Hidden Cities

I refused to pay attention to these titles but as I continued to read and analyze the text I noticed there had to be a pattern that characterized each group of cities or city.  I started by guiding myself with the table of contents and finding any similarities in the repetition of names and appearance of new ones. I wrote them on a sheet of paper and started to make a rough draft by jotting down the titles horizontally. I started with Cities and Memory and every time it was named I started a new line. By repeating the process in sections 2-9, I caught on the pattern by which Calvino introduced them.

My final draft looked like this:

In Chapter 1 the titles appeared to the right, every line a new city was mentioned from 1 being Cities and Memory, 2, 3, and Thin Cities 4.

In Chapter 2 it has 5 cities starting with Cities and Memory and at the end in 5, Trading Cities appears. Up until this point the cities are being mentioned in a rightward manner.

From Chapters 3 – 8 now the First cities are out, moving leftwards. For example in Chapter 3, it doesn’t start with Cities and Memory but rather the second one which is Cities and Desire and so forth every time introducing new cities as if it were a machine sliding to the left and eating up the first city name mentioned.

In Chapter 9, the pattern is continued but it is repeated 3 times as if it were 2 new chapters, but the difference is that it stops and Hidden Cities and then continues to delete the first names and no new ones are added.