Isidora: The City of the Self

Introduction
Calvino's second city, Isidora, is a renowned metaphor for how desire is endless but materialization
is limiting. The actuality of longing for perfection is non-existent, much as a lost wanderer in the
desert yearns for an oasis but often ends up in a mirage. You can keep making continuous
"spiraling" efforts for the rest of your life, but eventually you'll hit a wall like the one in Isidora,
where nothing makes sense. There's no sense of success; instead, there's a sense of dissatisfaction.
The city of desire eventually becomes a city of remembrance, rather than nostalgia.
Isidora is the city that appears when you have the greatest desire for a city. Isidora is a fantasy city
where you may see how your wants have already become memories. The story's young man arrives
in the city in his old age and sees himself as a young man having his desires fulfilled — the city
supports this by being built purely on the desires and dreams of individuals passing through.

The Past
It was a city with spiral staircases adorned with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and
violins were made and where cockfights devolve into brutal brawls among the bettors. Isidora is
thus was the city of dreams. It was a dreamed-of metropolis but now there is a wall in the square,
where old men sit and watch the young pass by.

The Present
Some of the spiral towers are still standing, but there are new poured stone constructions. They
tower above the earlier structures, which now appeared ragged and battered. Some fountains still
spew water, but they are spiky and rusty metal structures. They are more interested in thorns and
danger than in the life-giving coolness. Some older fountains were discovered, but many were
choked with sand and shattered, as dry as the desert.
Shadows lingered in the gardens, but instead of embracing, it felt threatening. Some of the gardens
were overgrown with weeds and untended. There was a stench of rot all about them. The previously
lush foliage had turned to straw and leaves that fell to dust, much like the fountains.
What Isidora represents?
Isidora is a city brimming with the outward manifestations of youth's ideal desires. Learnings,
culture, beauty, sex, unexpected violence...anything that a young traveler's heart and head might
desire. The irony is that the traveler arrives in the city as an elderly gentleman who can only sit
next to other elderly gentlemen and watch the young lads pass by. Isidora's metaphor is already
rich if taken at face value. People often achieve their youthful aspirations only after they are older
and the desires no longer hold the same attraction.
"Desires are already memories," Calvino says as a last punch line. That last statement has changed
my perspective on Isidora. The city itself isn't only a wish of a young tourist who has reached the
point when they can no longer appreciate it. It's the way our youth's desires impact our ability to
reflect on and remember our past. We frequently remember not what we experienced, but what we
wished to experience, to the point where what we wish cheapens and idealizes our own reality.

Significance
Calvino appears to be implying that humans exist in a physically organized system, symbolized
by a chessboard, which may be interpreted as Nature. However, the propensity of structuralism to
seek universal and hierarchical constructs appears to be rejected. Calvino instead advocates for a
variety of signifiers, rather than aiming to impose or favor one.
There is an ideal city growing somewhere in the world. Not as a prefabricated, totalizing reality,
but rather as a dispersed and fractured reality. What matters, is to seek out the Promised Land,
which is only known or founded in the mind.

What is Isidora to me?

There is weird juxtaposition in the statement - the fantasy of a city in which we walk as youthful
men and women, and our arrival in that city as old men and women. As the saying goes, "youth is
wasted on the young", I’m still in my youth, riding through untamed regions, and in my old age, I
will get to where I had dreamed of arriving when I was young. May be "city" to which I go to will
be unfamiliar to me, weird in the manner of Calvino's Isidora. The hardships might appear as the
never-ending spiral towers but there will be a certain kind of magic that can even make the quarrels
appear in sync with the tunes of the holy violin. Isidora is the city of the self; it belongs to us. The
desires have shaped the city to what it is and what it will be, just as how our life is shaped by what
we desire. Imagination can be wild but Isidora is grounded to its reality because people arrive here
after they have experienced life. Isidora is the symbol of wisdom to me discovered after years of
travelling by the travelers.

Conclusion
Isidora - a city that appears to be a young traveler's dream - excitement, high-end items, beauty,
and romance. It's cruel because it's just for the elderly and weary to enjoy. As a result, cities' charm
exists only in memory and promise.
The residents' obsession with the globes' little dream realms represents utopian thought. The
possibilities of the city are drowned when it becomes dystopic since the fantasies these globes
symbolize are so unattainable to achieve. Fortunately, there is an option, to seek and learn to
discern who and what, in the middle of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give
them space. Human beings can only cope with the inevitability of growth and its counterpart,
deterioration, by engaging with one another. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is a fascinating and
timely work that presents actual possibilities for today's societies.

References
CALVINO, I. (1997) Invisible Cities
BLOOM et al (2001) Modern Critical Views, Italo Calvino. Ed. Harold Bloom.
BORGES, J.L. (2000) Labyrinths