Since the last November, when I first read "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller" by Calvino and became utterly obsessed with his prose, "Invisible Cities" have been lurking in my to-be-read list, but, as always, in a very unexpected and spontaneous manner, I picked up on it on a random Thursday, one of the busiest days of the week, and consumed the whole book in less than two hours.

Italo Calvino has a talent of bright and engaging fiction that remains balanced between the mystery and vaguely familiar settings, thoughts, ideas. In my opinion, in this book he reached the peak of making the casual things look phantasmal and surrealistic; in fact, all 55 imagined cities with quirky names are revolving around one and only Venice. In the form of a travel log mixed with a dialogue, Calvino investigates the culture, language, society, life, memory and everything about the cities. I felt particularly moved by the thought that we always describe one city, no matter how much we travel and see the world. I think it is also like that for me - I saw so many of them, but if someone asks me to describe it, I will always end up comparing to my home city, more beautiful I could simply not find.

There is something meditatively melancholic in "Invisible Cities", or rather I was in a specifically nostalgic mood, trying to chase the ghosts of my past through a book of an Italian writer.