I'd love to read it in Italian too but that'd be a ways off for me. I've been more focused on reading Spanish due to my obsession with magical realism as of late.
Any passages or chapters in particular that you feel dropped the ball, ando?
Note: not much to spoil really but I'm dropping the spoiler tags moving forward.
This is a reread for me so I'm taking copious notes this time around after just drinking it in the first time and adi was right about the dissertation level aspect of "fully" understanding the novel. Because of that it's been slower going for me than expected. Though certain themes begin to settle into the narrative over time (namely condemning the inherently restrictive nature of urban sprawl/metropolises, memories/desires conflicting with and overriding reality, and the risk of increasingly bellicose undertones required to maintain these), it's so multi-faceted and each thread gives you tonnes to pull on.
One thing I picked up on that I didn't quite notice before—and an interpretation that's been inconsistent so I'm not too sure of its veracity—is that many of the cities are described similarly to physical body parts and structures. When describing the physical features of Zora (Cities and Memories 4) for example, it seems like the city is divided into similar regions as our brain lobes. I̶s̶i̶d̶o̶r̶a̶ ̶(̶C̶i̶t̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶M̶e̶m̶o̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶2̶)̶ Anastasia (Cities and Desires 2): has concentric canals that are reminiscent of the relationship between the pupil, the iris, and the whites of the eyes, irrigated by tearducts. The toy globes of alternate realities in Fedora recall synapses. Dorothea's canals that subdivide and nourish the whole city is similar to the heart and circulatory system. Some of the Thin Cities (the most perplexing passages in the book imo) are reminiscent of circulatory and nervous systems. Would love to see if anyone else noticed similar trends (or thinks my thoughts are dumb af; Dorothea and the Thin Cities felt like a bit of a stretch).
I'll pop back in with some more macro interpretations once I finish it. I have thoughts on the mathematical structure that I want to verify before I blurt.
Btw, here is Calvino talking about his writing process for Invisible Cities in a way that's both enlightening and unnecessarily cryptic lol:
https://thisiscitycentric.files.word...cture-1983.pdf