Spaces of the A-Temporal: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the Early Modern Imagination

Abstract

Focusing on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this chapter is concerned with imagined architectures as a form of literary inheritance. It traces consonances between the Italian novelist’s fluid, open-ended built spaces and the plural, liminal spaces of a series of Baroque texts, paintings, architectures and artefacts of the seventeenth century. Its interdisciplinary approach decisively connects Calvino’s literary city to material culture, yet at the same time shows how imagined architectures may reveal a fundamental disbelief in ‘the solidity of our realities’. Todorović’s concern with imaginative representations of a sense of transience and unbelonging challenges and extends the Heideggerian and Bachelardian foundations of this volume; the architectures that she explores serve as a means of envisaging undwelling, unhousing, unbelonging.

A longer version of this chapter was published in the book Jelena Todorović, The Hidden Legacies of Baroque Culture in Contemporary Literature: The Realms of Eternal Present (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017).