Diomira. Bronze statues of all the gods. Peaceful and unique.

Isidora. City of his Dreams. Childs imagination.

Dorothea. The city in the past, present, and future. Futuristic.

Zaira. Lines of a hand. Tale telling and predictable.

Anastasia. The treacherous city. Dangerous and unknowing.

Tamara. Burning relatives’ corpses. Dirty city.

Zora. Musical score where not a note can be altered or displayed. Dreamy wonderland.

Despina. He thinks of ships. Nothing is as it seems.

Zirma. It repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. Same thing over and over.

Isaura. City of the thousand wells. Luscious with water.

Maurilia. One saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today. Not always as it appears.

Fedora. The ideal city. Picture perfect.

Zoe. Nothing but doubts. Unattainable belief.

Zenobia. With its pilings and suspended staircases. Prim and proper.

Euphemia. “hidden treasures”. Hunger Raves, hunger settles.

Zobeide. This ugly city. Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Hypatia. Crabs were biting the eyes of the suicides. Misleading cities.

Armilla. Abandoned before ore after it was inhabited. Disappearing city.

Chloe. Eyes lock for a second, then dart away. All the same but totally different.

Valdrada. Sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Mirror image.

Olivia. Inhabitants’ industry. Extremely dirty work.

Sophronia. They uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off. Yearly fair, removable.

Eutropia. All these cities together. The melting pot.

Zemrude. Following every day the same stretches of street and finding again each morning the ill-humor of the day before. Today is soon tomorrow.

Aglaura. But what was bizarre has become usual. Everything is as it seems.

Octavia. Little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces. Booby trapped city.

Ersilia. They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. The good-bad city.

Baucis. With spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it. Perfectly pictured.

Leandra. They belong to the house, and when the family that has lived there goes away, they remain with the new tenants; perhaps they were already there before the house existed. Hidden treasures.

Melania. Even if none of them keeps the same eyes and voice he had in the previous scene. Changing places.

Esmeralda. Marked in different colored inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. Not easily discovered.

Phyllis. Which elude the gaze of all, except the man who catches them by surprise. You never quite know what you might be looking for.

Pyrrha. Given it a name that means something entirely different. Nothing is as it seems.

Adelma. He had disappeared down an alley. Life after death and life during death.

Eudoxia. Symmetrical motives whose patterns are repeated along straight and circular lines. Memorable mathematical patterns.

Moriana. Alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight. Angelic white angels.

Clarice. It was all there, merely arranged in a different order, no less appropriate to the inhabitants’ needs than it had been before. Honestly mistaken.

Eusapia. Identical copy of their city, underground. The mystical hidden city.

Beersheda. Silver locks and diamond gates, a jewel city, all inset and inlaid. The majestic jewels.

Leonia. The things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Irene. A name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes. Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Argia. The place is deserted. A ghost town.

Thekla. The city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper. A delicate dessert.

Trude. But you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. An intricate trinket.

Olinda. And then if becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city. Look deeper and you might see what is not already there.

Laudomia. The dead, the cemetery. Life before death, life after death.

Perinthia. Reflect harmony. One big happy family.

Procopia. I saw the ditch vanish, the tree, the bramble patch. Over population.

Raissa. City of sadness. A river of sadness.

Andria. The days on earth and the nights in the sky reflect each other. Mirror image of astronomy.

Cecilia. Ask me the names of the grazing lands: I know them all. Fortune teller.

Marozia. Consists of two cities, the rat’s and the swallows’s; both change with time but their relationship does not change. Consistent inconsistency.

Penthesilia. You advance for hours and it is not clear to you whether you are already in the city’s midst or still outside it. The never ending story.

Theodora. One by one the species incompatible to the city had to succumb and were extinguished. A forest fire.

Berenice. Meat-grinding machines. Slavery.


The narrator in Calvino’s work is Marco Polo. The historical significance of this book is that the author is explaining one specific city in great detail, examining every aspect of the personality of the people, city, and atmosphere. The author would make such a choice in contemporary times because so often people forget what this unique city started as and where is it is today. The author begins his tales in the first person and then later in the book he changes to third person. I think this changes because he detaches himself as the author and begins to see the bigger picture of the city and imagines himself part of the city rather than touring the city.