Status Updates From Invisible Cities

If you've ever wanted to read a bunch of short descriptions of fictional cities, this is the book for you.

Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.

"There is something you do not know," the Khan adds.
"The grateful moon has granted the city of Lalage a rarer privilege: to grow in lightness."

The Great Khan contemplates an empire covered with cities that weigh upon the earth and upon man-kind, crammed with wealth and traffic, overladen with ornaments and offices, complicated with mechanisms and hierarchies, swollen, tense, ponderous.
"The empire is being crushed by its own weight," Ku-blai thinks,

Grande libro ma non grande romanzo.

how did mister calvino think up all these wondrous places