Michele Colombo LE CITTA INVISIBILI per due fagotti

This project was born from an encounter with Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, a book that does not describe places, but states of mind, fragile balances, and unseen connections. The cities that Marco Polo recounts to Kublai Khan do not reveal themselves at a glance: they exist in the tension between presence and absence, between memory and imagination.

I chose to wander through some of these cities — Ottavia, Valandra, Bauci, and Ersilia — translating their abstraction into sound. Music becomes an ethereal thread, an intangible sketch that seeks not to render the shape of the cities, but their very essence: suspension, connection, distance, reflection. Ottavia is fragile equilibrium, life suspended on a net that can hold only so far.
Valandra is the double, a mirrored city, the unresolved dialogue between what is and what appears.

Here, sound does not illustrate; it hints. It builds invisible, suspended, unstable spaces.

Bauci is the distant gaze, the observation of the world from a high vantage point, a contemplation of one’s own absence.
Ersilia is the weave of human relations, threads entwined until letting go and being reborn elsewhere becomes inevitable.

Music becomes a place to inhabit, if only temporarily, like Calvino’s cities, inviting the listener to traverse these inner landscapes and complete their meaning through their own experience.