Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1974 (1972)

It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing

All lunatics spend hours on cornices

Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unposessed places.

As this wave of memories flows in, the city soaks up like a sponge and expands

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name. 

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes     

Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches    

He knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert

If the traveller does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one

Is what you see always behind you?, or rather, Does your journey take place only in the past?

Isaura a city that moves entirely upwards    

Journeys to recover you past? (…) Journeys to recover your future?    

Leaving there and proceeding for three days towards the east, you reach diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theatre, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower

Memory is redundant: it repeats itself so that the city can begin to exist 

one city was depicted by the leap of a fish escaping from the cormorants beak  

The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content (…) if a s a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labour which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave

The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the the measurements of its space and the events of its past

The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there

This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember. (…) Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world's most learned men are those who have memorized Zora. (..) forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, dispappeared. The Earth has fogotten her.

When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city  

You walk for days (…) rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognised that thing as a sign for another thing. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.(…) If a building has no signboard or figure, its form and the position it occupies in the city's order suffice to indicate its function. (...) Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.

Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its succession of streets. (…) Zora's secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced.