Italo Calvino's &lt;I&gt;Le Città Invisibili&lt;/I&gt; and 'la sfida al labirinto'

Ferraro, Bruno

doi:10.1179/026143488791333611

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Breiner is aware of this interpretative violence claiming that notion is "of course explicitly rejected by Marco" (Breiner 565) and accuses Marco of perversity ("But Marco is often perverse" (Breiner 565)) in pursuing his interpretation. Bruno Ferraro [17] maps Invisible Cities by comparing its complex structure to the combination of "two sets of notions -narrative as a combinatory process and literature as challenger to the labyrinthine complexity of the world" (Ferraro 57).…”

Section: Mapping the 'Impossible' -Heterotopia And Rhizomementioning

confidence: 99%

A Dream of the Perfect Map – Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Vrbančić¹

2012

[sic]

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A Dream of the Perfect Map -Calvino's Invisible CitiesThe cartographer's dream is that of a perfect map: a map that perfectly represents a territory, a dream of Divine knowledge; a map that has haunted the ideology of representation throughout history; a map so detailed that it coincides with real space. In a short parable, 'Museum, on Exactitude in Science' [1] , Borges describes the mysterious gild of cartographers which charts such a map.In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography (Borges 325).confines (no bigger than the globe held by God on the Hereford map). In a sense the Aleph is a goal of cartography, its theology. Instead of God's gaze into the unknown distance (as on the Hereford map), Renaissance cartographers imagined the Ptolemaic human gaze looking down on the Earth. The cartographer's 'organ of sight' began to shift from the inner eye of the soul to the physical eye of the body: the idea of the globe as a whole observed by a 'roving human eye' is connected to the Renaissance idea of perspectivism. In many respects Renaissance concepts of space laid the foundations for the Enlightenment project. Maps were stripped of spiritual space, of their angels and their monsters; cartographers were involved in the production of abstract and functional systems based on mathematically rigorous depiction. By conceiving space as abstract, homogenous and universal, perspectivism and mathematical mapping enabled the era of great discoveries and colonization. Since then, the world has become more and more enmeshed in different maps, in different spaces, including that without volume, a new immaterial space of digital being. By constantly increasing digital connections of one site with thousands of others, cyberspace branches out in many directions at once, creating a labyrinthine web. Its expansion parallels the latest theory of cosmology, of an 'inflationary' period, during which the whole cosmos swelled from a microscopic point smaller than a proton to the size of a grapefruit in a fraction of a second. Paradoxically, we live in an ambiguous spatial construction: on one hand there seems to be a perfect map of the Empire that covers the territory (modern science masters both micro and macro worlds ever more precisely); on the other hand social theory reflects an...

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Section: Mapping the 'Impossible' -Heterotopia And Rhizomementioning

confidence: 99%