Invisible Cities

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**Title** **Invisible Cities**
Cover of first English edition (hardcover)
Author	Italo Calvino
Original title	Le città invisibili
Translator	William Weaver
Country	Italy
Language	Translated to English from the original Italian
Genre(s)	novel
Publisher	Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (first English edition)
Released	1972 (Italian) 1974 (English)
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	165 pp (first English edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-151-45290-3 (first English edition)

Invisible Cities (Italian: Le città invisibili) is a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino. It was published in Italy in 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1975.

The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by the narrator, Marco Polo. The book is framed as a conversation between the aging and busy emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his empire, and Polo. The majority of the book consists of Polo's descriptions (1-3 pages each) of the 55 cities. Short dialogues between the two characters are interspersed every five to ten cities and are used to discuss various ideas presented by the cities on a wide range of topics including linguistics and human nature.

The book is probably based (at least in structure) on The Travels of Marco Polo, his travelogue of the Mongol Empire written in the 13th century, which shares with Invisible Cities the brief, often fantastic accounts of the cities he visits, accompanied by descriptions of the city's inhabitants, notable imports and exports, and whatever interesting tales Polo had heard about the region.