18092601
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2400-22-- BC
82 AD
124
135
309
311
313
313
314-326
314-349
315
315
326
1762
1954-58
1957
1992
1998
1999-2005
2001
2013
2013
2015
2018
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Stonehenge
Colosseum
Pantheon
Temple of Venus and Rome
Circus of Maxentius Tomb of Romulus
Arch of Janus Quadrifrons
Thermae Helenae
Basilica of Maxentius/Constantine
Basilica of Sts. Peter and Marcellinus Mausoleum of Helena
Basilica of St. Agnes Mausoleum of Constantina
Arch of Constantine
Baths of Constantine
Basilica Sessorianum
Triumphal Way
Seagram Building
City Tower
Parc de la Villette
Y2K House
Casa da Musica
Flick House I
Eutropia
New Not There City
Cubist ICM
Flick in Musica
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IQ62
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2003.01.01 13:04
Trading Cities 3
The following is from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities:
Trading Cities 3
When he enters the territory of which Eutropia is the capital, the traveler sees not one city but many, of equal size and not unlike one another, scattered over a vast, rolling plateau. Eutropia is not one, but all these cities together; only one is inhabited at a time, the others are empty; and this process is carried out in rotation. Now I shall tell you how. On the day when Eutropia's inhabitants feel the grip of weariness and no one can bear any longer his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, the people he must greet or who greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to move to the next city, which is there waiting for them, empty and good as new; there each will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another landscape on opening his window, and will spend his time with different pastimes, friends, gossip. So their life is renewed from move to move, among cities whose exposure or declivity or streams or winds make each site somehow different from the others. Since their society is ordered without great distinctions of wealth or authority, the passage from one function to another takes place almost without jolts; variety is guaranteed by the multiple assignments, so that in the span of a lifetime a man rarely returns to a job that has already been his.
Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open alternative mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle.
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