This is one of my favorite books in the whole wide world. It's hard to express what this book means to me.

The last (and first) time I read this book, years ago, I was trying to be an architecture student. I focused almost entirely on the literal, spatial aspects of the cities, and missed a lot of what Calvino was saying about modes of existence and perception. My reading skills have evolved a lot since then and I got a lot more out of it this time around. This is the kind of book that can be reread over and over, showing you something new each time, a little bit like the cities it describes.

It would be impossible to pick my favorite of these cities, but here is one I liked a lot:

"CITIES & EYES: 3

After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.

There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence."

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

I didn't mean to let this one go, but I passed it on to my friend and traveling buddy L. for the next leg of our/her trip. If she likes it half as much as I did, she'll like it a lot.