Zobeide: The White City

ZOBEIDE THE WHITE CITY & ITS INHABITANTS

Men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city.

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— ITALO CALVINO — INVISIBLE CITIES 3

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…Newly arrived and quite ignorant of the languages of the Levant, Marco Polo could express himself only by drawing objects from his baggage—drums, salt fish, necklaces of wart hogs’ teeth—and pointing to them with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder or of horror, imitating the bay of the jackal, the hoot of the owl.

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Zobeide In INVISIBLE CITIES, the traveler Marco Polo unspools fantastic tales of the Khan empire and its contents to Kublai Khan.

Zobeide is one of these invisible cities.

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This pinball game was propped against an old man's stand in the Santo Spirito monthly Antique Market. In the half second it caught my eye, I was lost in glorious, cheesy outer space.

From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the White City, well-exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation:

men of various nations had an identical dream.

This photo is a friend's. I tried tracing down the exact spot she mentioned but gave up quickly.

It's near a cafe called Melatte or something—it used to be a prison, she says.

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They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked.

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This picture was captured by a friend in Florence. I think I saw it in the daytime in Santo Spirito, but without its green glow I couldn't be sure.

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They dreamed of pursuing her.

As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her.

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This paper label was found at the Antique Market in Santo Spirito. It is from the instructions and packaging of a British toymaker named Meccano that was closed down in 1979.

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The connections between one element of the story and another were not always obvious to the emperor;

After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream.

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This sign, found at Santa Maria Novella train station, is the largest piece of text in the massive station. It reads "Uscita," or "Exit".

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In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.

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an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made.

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But what enhanced for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his inarticulate informer was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words.

This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night.

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None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again.

The city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.

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WELCOME TO

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The graffiti on the wall of my friend's photo reads "IL VERO DEGRADO SONO I MILITARI NELLA STRADE," which translates to "The real insults are the military in the streets."

New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something of the streets of the dream...

The "P" photo is Susan's. While setting my parents up for their visit to Florence, I bumped into the same "P" above a parking garage on their block. The lawn chair is part of a series found in the Santo Spirito Market. Other chairs read "Saint Tropez" and "Capri".

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and they changed the positions of arcades and stair ways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape.

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The descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.

The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.

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Yet another market find: Rinstead Pastilles, for temporary relief of pain and discomfort caused by mouth ulcers and denture sore spots. When I looked it up on Amazon I was horribly disappointed by the "new" packaging which had robbed the pillbox of all its character.

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The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there. ...and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.

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— ITALO CALVINO — INVISIBLE CITIES

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ZOBEIDE — Zobeide is excerpted from Invisible Cities, the 1972 novel by Italo Calvino. This book was produced for Experimental Typography in April of 2016 by Noah Baker.

Design, photography and additional writing by Noah Baker.

Additional photography by Michelle Kim and Susan Lee. All photos shot in Florence, Italy.

TYPE — The typefaces used in this book are Graphik and Eksell Display.

Graphik, designed by Christian Schwartz for CommercialType was "inspired by the elegant plainness seen in many of the less common 20th century European sans serifs and in handlettering on classic Swiss Modern posters."

Eksell Display was the only complete typeface designed by Swedish designer Olle Ekselle in 1962. It was digitized in 2015 by Letters From Sweden, seen in this book in its Medium weight.

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