The Invisible Cities are twenty-five hollow cities hidden in the desert beyond the Silk Road, darkened by the shadow of devils and freed one by one through decisions and wishes. They are mapped, but found only “wherever one goes”, sometimes off the normal maps.
| Type | Concept (hidden cities) |
| Number | 25 (5 named) |
| Era | Age of the Renaissance (1493–1498 A.D.A.) |
| Spanish entry | Ciudades Invisibles |
Names
Five are named: Diomirra, Isidora, Teodora, Zenobia and Sofronia — “women’s names”. The other twenty are unnamed.
Nature
- Hidden by scale: “since the desert is so big, if you don’t go with a caravan and so on, you don’t see them.” Their regions keep “the old names they had”.
- Hollow: each city is an empty body. The shadow of devils “hooks” into the hollow, leaving the city “hidden in a way taken by the shadow of devils”, blackened within.
- Chained: beneath them runs an inner world of cavities and passages: “this is an inner world… but there’s a hole. That is the next city.” One leaves a city by perforation and enters the next.
- Mobile: creatures of the Oblivion kind “even made the invisible cities, in certain past ages, move and destroy cities”.
Clearing them
Each city poses a different problem: “as we see each city we make a sort of philosophical decision on how to clear it, return it to the light.” Wishes are the declared instrument of liberation. The cycle takes place some 180 or 190 years after Dante and the discovery of the portals of Hell, “in a world where the individual can already perfectly choose a path”.
Associations
Marco Polo is said to have “written the invisible cities with him”. They are also named in connection with Florence: “those of Florence, the invisible cities”.
Open questions
- What “hooking” into the hollow means: possession, control, a link to other planes, or something else.
- The names of the other twenty; any description, size or population of any city.
- How the wishes work: who makes them, at what cost, how many per city.
- Why all the names are women’s; which desert this is.
- Whether the inner world links all twenty-five, and in fixed order.
- When the Oblivion moved them, and which cities they crushed.
Gallery
