Invisible Cities is a text of patterns and symmetry. It is divided into nine chapters, the first and last containing descriptions of 10 cities, while the other chapters contain five each. There are 11 categories of cities with five representative descriptions, so Marco Polo describes 55 cities in total. The structure of nine chapters and interlocked categories resembles Dante's Divine Comedy and its use of the terza rima.
However, while Dante starts his journey in hell and ends his journey in heaven, Marco Polo's description of cities reverses the pattern: At first, Marco Polo's images seem like delicate, pastel paintings with words, but gradually they become darker and soon create a nightmarish panorama of decay and ruins which resembles our modern world (when Marco Polo starts talking about machines, airports and skyscrapers, it becomes clear that he and the emperor are not the actual historical figures). Roughly in the middle of the text he admits that all the cities he has been describing so far are simply different aspects of one city, Venice. Polo's statement, therefore, serves as a turning point, and he explains that Venice is decaying, which is why he tries to preserve it in his memory.
Often, Marco Polo also describes the symmetry within a city. For example, Valdrada, a city built over a reflecting lake, appears as two cities: "One erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat." Another example is Andria, which is "built so artfully that its every street follows a planet’s orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars."
At the same time, the emperor thinks he has discovered Marco Polo's pattern of telling stories, and in his mind he tries to construct a city of his own. He compares the cities to a game of chess and reckons that if he is able to understand the underlying rules, he will be able to understand all his cities and therefore he shall "finally possess [his] empire" even though he has not seen them. The emperor's thinking, his desire to find the underlying rules that govern all his cities, resembles humankind's desire to explain the universe with only a small set of rules, as the search for the Theory of Everything demonstrates.
But is the inferno inevitable? Indeed, the emperor's outlook on the future of humankind is grim. Having listened to Marco Polo's descriptions of various cities, he concludes that the final destination is the infernal city. Polo, however, recognizes that humans have a choice and are therefore able to avert the downfall if they are willing to stop being passive: "There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." It is therefore up to every one of us to tell the emperor "toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us."
