Invisible Cities Made Visible with Zach Storm

“‘My empire has grown too far toward the outside. It is time,’ the Khan thought, ‘for it to grow within itself,’ and he dreamed of pomegranate groves, the fruit so ripe it burst its skin, zebus browning on the spit and dripping fat, veins of metal surfacing with glistening nuggets.” —Kublai Khan thinking to himself while sitting with Marco Polo (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1974)

This class focuses on imaginative world-building as related to the ornate embellishments of the Venetian Republic and Ottoman Empire. Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities imagines the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo inventing descriptions for the many cities of the empire of Kublai Khan, who ruled in East Asia before the rise of the Ottoman Empire in western Asia. In this class we are the ones creating never-before-seen worlds as we become the cartographers of our own inner empires.

Image: Courtesy of the artist