Zenobia City, Karina Puente Zenobia, Colleen Corradi Brannigan Zenobia, Maria Monsonet Here are a few culled from the internet if you feel so moved, feel free to add your own favorites (or your own!) below.

So, this Sunday being Italo Calvino’s birthday, it seems as good a time as any to share some of the treatments artists have given various cities from what is probably his most beloved book. Every once in a while, I’ll see some gorgeous image pop up in a search, and it will seem familiar to me somehow-when I click, I’ll find that it’s another vision of Octavia, or Zenobia, in one of its infinite possible permutations. But it isn’t only avid readers who are fans of Invisible Cities (though I’d wager a strong percentage of the novel’s fans are writers) many artists, designers, and architects have also taken inspiration from Calvino’s imaginary cityscapes and invented architectures-whether overtly or indirectly-and I frequently hear of this book being used in design and art classes of all levels. And I quickly figured out that other people like this book too. I took Invisible Cities out of the library. I couldn’t report you many specific details from the book now-there’s not much story to speak of-but I remember the feeling of sitting in the grass and reading it, feeling the coldness of it, the sense of being sucked into another dimension, a series of images both dreamlike and exact, a pleasure simultaneously visceral and intellectual. I couldn’t see more than two feet in front of my face. My relationship had just exploded, and I was very depressed I only knew one person in town, and she was in rapturous love with her new boyfriend. I was working a tedious job at my college over one summer, living in a strange dorm room with no internet. Sometimes I like to think that Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities saved my life, but it might be more accurate to say it saved my mind.

Italo calvino the invisible cities