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and perhaps this is the germ of an immense metropolis. ...

From these data it is possible to deduce an image of the future Berenice, which will bring you closer to knowing the truth than any other information abour the city as it is seen today. You must nevertheless bear in mind what I am about to say to you: in the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hid-den, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right-and of being more just than many others

Instead of describing to you the perfumed pools of the baths where the unjust of Berenice recline and weave their intrigues with round eloquence and observe with a proprietary eye the rotund fesh of the bathing odalisques, I should say to you how the just, always cautious to evade the spying sycophants and the Janizaries' mass arrests, recognize one another by their way of speaking,

become the pleasure of others: all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.everything must happen as if by chance, without attaching too much importance to it, without insisting that you are performing a decisive operation, remembering … any moment the old Marozia will return and solder its ceiling of store, cobwebs, and mold over all heads

I have come back to Marozia after many years: for some time the sibyl's prophecy is considered to have come true; the old century is dead and buried, the new is at its climax. The city has surely changed, and perhaps for the better. But the wings I have seen moving about are those of suspicious umbrellas under which heavy eyelids are lowered; there are people who believe they are flying, but it is already an

the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: "Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence."

Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of
monsters.

If you ask, "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they
answer,
"So that its destruction cannot begin." And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, "Not only the city."

It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.

In the place of roofs they imagine that the underground city has overturned rubbish bins, with cheese rinds, greasy paper, fish scales, dishwater, uneaten spaghetti, old bandages spilling from them.

They say that every time they go below they find something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make innovations in their city; not many, but surely the fruit of sober reflection, not passing whims.

The questions are asked in silence. And it is always about themselves that living ask, not about those who are to come.

In traveling you realise that differences are lost. Places exchange their form, order, distances. A shapeless dust cloud invades the continent.

You reach a moment in life when among the people you have known the dead outlive the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces. More expressions. On every new face you encounter it prints the old forms. For each one it finds the most suitable mask.

When you encounter only the dead, the dream frightens me. If Edalma is a real city inhabited by real people I need only continued looking at them and the resemblances will resolve. Alien faces will appear bearing anguish. In either case it is best for not to insist on staring at them.

Clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history.
Several times it decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the first Clarice as an unparalleled model of every splendor, compared to which the city's present state can only cause more sighs at every fading of the stars.

The city is redundant. It repeats itself so that something will stick in a mind.

POLO: Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging garden of the Great Khan's palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside.

But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.

I thought: "You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, tor each one it finds the most suitable mask."

Many are the cities like Phyllis, which elude the gaze of all, except the man who catches them by surprise.