, Originally uploaded by downtownbrown
by Italo Calvino is general travel reading – it’s word pictures of fantastical cities, told to Genghis Khan by Marco Polo. He was talking about Venice, really, but he was also talking about exploring, & how sense is made:
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the bannisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
New York makes a guest appearance, later:
the city in the shape of New Amsterdam known also as New York, crammed with towers of glass and steel on an oblong island between two rivers, with streets like deep canals, all of them straight, except Broadway.
