Are They Inside?

Through the beginning of the book Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino different thoughts started forming and merging in my mind. In class earlier we had discussed about a more figurative meaning about what the book and the story actually meant. It all led me to think if in fact the cities described by Marco Polo were not only different kinds of knowledge, but they ment something more too.

The book can be seen and understood in a figurative way, and thus the reader can truly understand the meaning of it. Calvino explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cities by Marco Polo. Not only can the reader understand that somehow all the cities are connected (by purely human characteristics)but also how everything is interconnected. Many of the titles of the sections, for example, describe the cities with human features.  "Cities and Memory" "Cities and Desire" "Cities and the dead" etc. Furthermore, what Marco Polo describes in the cities can be interpreted as plain human characteristics, are they memories, desires, greed, or with human qualities like being tempting artistic, or subtle. 

This all leads to the proof that somehow, all the cities resemble humans, and if interpreted in a more symbolic way, cities are all the knowledge that is out there that we store in our minds, thus making the cities a part of our mind.