I read it (finally) after seeing Jacob Geller talk about it in his video on Disco Elysium.

I’m not great at metaphors and such so there we’re a lot of sections that flew over my head in terms of meaning (i.e, the city where there is one for the living and one for the dead), while other bits I found especially profound (like the bit where Marco Polo talks about Venice, or where Kublai Khan creates cities "too probable to exist). There were obviously parts I disliked from a quality standpoint (i.e, the occasional objectification of women [although this was wierdly concentrated in just a few cities in the middle] and the idealistic portrayal of cyclical oppression seen in one of the waning chapters of the book). Overall though I really liked the theme of having two “knows.” As in your objective knows (how many people are there, where does one street lead to another, etc.) And your instinctual knows (what the city means to you, what it means to others, etc. [Sorry it’s hard to explain. I tupid]

I know 20th century italian postmodernist literature is a niche topic, but id like some opinions ground myself if anyone here has read it

Edit: It’s Italo Calvino, it just autocorrected to Italy for some reason