On the occasion of an exhibition of “author’s books” held in the Casanatense at the end of the last century, a work by American engraver John Ross entitled Visible cities. These are 12 large engravings made with collographic technique, depicting various architectures inspired by the cities described in Italo Calvino’s book, “The Invisible Cities”. The prints-contained in a black cloth-lined slipcase with an architectural resin façade affixed to the front cover along with the title printed on a wooden tablet-are accompanied by excerpts from Calvin’s work. We publish in Italian the texts of the plates, which are in English. John Ross Visibile Cities : with excerpt from “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino ; translated from the Italian by William Weaver. New York, HighTide Press, 1993 – collographs 460×650 mm 10 engravings+front+end sheet ed. num. 25 copies ex. no. 11 The work is part of the Prints and Drawings Collection of the Casanatense with the collocation 20.B.II.185 
To the man who rides long through wild lands comes longing for a city. At last he comes to Isadora, a city where the palaces have spiral staircases encrusted with sea snails, where telescopes and violins are made to perfection, where when the stranger is uncertain between two women he always meets a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the gamblers. All these things he thought of when he longed for a city. Isadora is thus the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed city contained him young; in Isadora he arrives late in life. In the square is the little wall of old men watching youth pass by; he sits in line with them. Wishes are already memories. 
In vain, magnanimous Kublai, will I attempt to describe to you the city of Zaira from the high ramparts. I could tell of how many steps the streets are made of stairs, of what sixths the arches of the arcades, of what sheets of zinc the roofs are covered with; but I already know that it would be like telling you nothing. This is not what the city is made of, but of relationships between measures of its space and the events of its past: the distance from the ground of a lamppost and the dangling feet of a hanged usurper; the wire stretched from the lamppost to the railing in front and the streamers that impregnated the path of the queen’s wedding procession; the height of that railing and the adulterer’s leap over it at dawn; the slant of a gutter and the swooping of a cat into the same window; the firing line of the gunship suddenly appearing behind the leader and the bomb destroying the gutter; the rips in the fishing nets and the three old men sitting on the pier mending nets telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the usurper’s gunboat, said to have been an adulterous son of the queen, abandoned in swaddling clothes there on the pier […] 
There are two ways to talk about the city of Dorothea: I would say that four aluminum towers rise from its walls flanking seven gates of the spring-loaded drawbridge that spans the moat whose water feeds four green canals that cross the city and divide it into nine neighborhoods, each of three hundred houses and seven hundred funnels; and taking into account that the marriageable girls from each neighborhood marry young men from other neighborhoods and their families exchange the wares that each has in privative: bergamots, sturgeon eggs, astrolabes, amethysts, do calculations based on these data until you know everything you want about the city in the past in the present in the future; or say like the camel driver who led me there: “I arrived there in my early youth, one morning, mota people were hurrying through the streets to the market, women had beautiful teeth and looked straight into their eyes, three soldiers on top of a stage were playing the clarinet, everywhere around were spinning wheels and waving colorful signs. […]
[…] Finally the journey leads to the town of Tamara. One wanders through the streets thick with signs protruding from the walls. The eye sees not things but figures of things that signify other things: the tong indicates the quarryman’s house, the mug the tavern, the halberds the guardhouse, the stadera the herbivore. Statues and shields represent lions dolphins towers stars: signs that something-who knows what-has a lion or dolphin or tower or star for a sign. Other signs warn of what is forbidden in a place – entering the alley with carts, urinating behind the shrine, fishing with a rod from the bridge – and what is lawful – watering zebras, playing bowls, burning the corpses of relatives. From the door of the temples one can see the statues of the gods, each depicted with his attributes: the cornucopia, the hourglass, the jellyfish, so the worshipper can recognize them and address the right prayers to them. […] 
There are two ways to reach Despina: by boat or by camel. The city looks different to those coming from land and those from the sea. The camel-driver who sees the pinnacles of skyscrapers, radar antennas, flapping their red and white wind-sleeves, throwing smoke up the funnels, pop up on the horizon of the plateau, thinks of a ship, knows it’s a city but thinks of it as a bastion taking him out of the desert, a sailing ship about to set sail, with the wind already swelling the sails not yet untied, or a steamer with the boiler vibrating in the iron hull, and he thinks of all the ports, the overseas goods that cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over their heads, the lighted windows on the first floor, each with a woman combing her hair. […] 
From the city of Zirma travelers return with distinct memories: a blind Negro shouting into the crowd, a madman leaning out from the ledge of a skyscraper, a girl walking with a cougar tied to a leash. In fact many of the blind men who beat their sticks on the pavements of Zirma are Negroes, in every skyscraper there is someone who goes mad, all the madmen spend hours on ledges, there is no cougar who is not bred on a girl’s whim. The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something comes to fix itself in the mind. I, too, return from Zirma: my recollection includes airships flying in all directions at window height, streets of stores where tattoos are drawn on sailors’ skin, underground trains crammed with obese women in the heat. Comrades who were with me on the trip, on the other hand, swear they saw a single airship hovering between the city’s spires, a single tattoo artist arranging needles and inks and pierced designs on his bench, a single woman-cannon making wind on the platform of a carriage. Memory is redundant: it repeats the signs for the city to begin to exist. 
Now I will say of the city of Zenobia, which has this admirable: though placed on dry land it stands on very high stilts, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many balconies and balconies, set at different heights, on stilts that climb over each other, connected by ladders and hanging sidewalks, surmounted by belvederes covered with cone-shaped canopies, barrels of water tanks, wind-marking pinwheels, and pulleys, fishing lines and cranes protrude from them. What need or commandment or desire prompted the founders of Zenobia to give this form to their city is not remembered and therefore it cannot be said whether it was fulfilled by the city as we see it today, grown perhaps by successive superimpositions from the first and now indecipherable design.[…] 
The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake with houses all verandas one on top of the other and high streets overlooking the water the balustrade parapets. Thus the traveler see coming two towns: one straight above the lake, the other reflected upside down. There is no such thing or occurrence in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, for the city was built so that every point of it was reflected by its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the grooves and overhangs of the facades rising above the lake but also the interior of the rooms with the ceilings and floors, the perspective of the corridors, the mirrors of the closets. […] 
There is no city more inclined than Eusapia to enjoy life and escape the troubles. And so that the leap from life to death would be less abrupt, the inhabitants built an identical copy of their city underground. The corpses, dried so that their skeletons covered in yellow skin remain, are taken down there to continue their former occupations. Of these, it is the lighthearted moments that have the preference: most of them are seated around laid tables, or posed in dance positions or in the gesture of playing trumpets. But even all the trades and crafts of the Eusapia of the living are at work underground, or at least those to which the living have fulfilled with more satisfaction than annoyance: the watchmaker, in the midst of all those stopped clocks in his store, accosts a wrinkled ear to a misplaced clock; a barber soaps the bone of an actor’s cheekbones with a dry brush while the actor goes over the part scrutinizing the script with empty circles under his eyes; a girl with a laughing skull milks a heifer carcass […]