Italo - a very short story in the style of Italo Calvino

 

Hard up against the Northern Frontier lies the abandoned city of Italo. No one knows who occupied it, if indeed it ever was so used. It is, in general, a city that defies, or at least deters and frustrates understanding. There is a rough geometric grid, of sorts, to which the buildings are obliged to conform, streets running one way, avenues another. However there is an irregularity to both the angles and the offset distances between roads that adheres to no discernible pattern.

Likewise, the buildings show a semblance of order, elements are consistent between different buildings, a pillar here, a lintel there. But such familiar elements are seldom seen to be arranged twice in the same manner. A lintel that goes over a window, is elsewhere a hearth for a fire. The exteriors of the buildings bear little relation to their interiors. Windows arranged randomly surround a regular commonplace interior arrangement, and likewise the contrary.

At this distance in time it is impossible to determine the function of the buildings that remain. Likewise no quarters are discernible by likely function in that city. In whole and in part, it defies categorisation. There is no style, no commonality, no repetition. It is a maddening city, it defies logic and intuition. It is impossible to place the buildings within any typology, to conjecture any order to their construction. Devoid of the sun or the stars, as with a cloudy firmament, you quickly lose your bearings.

Scholars are, in general, frustrated, by Italo, and it is little studied as there is so little that one can usefully say about it. The lack of interest in the city is doubly manifested in those who lived there or chose to build it. No image can form of the creators of such a frustrating place. There is nothing to be said for or of them.
The young turks of urban historiography put forward a theory, a half hearted and playful notion. Their conjecture is that Italo was never occupied, it was the physical manifestation of some lost architectural manifesto, some set of forgotten tenets, part intellectual, part religious. An auto-da-fé for some past sins. A festival of possibilities, endless permutations, built and rebuilt, formed and reformed, seeking some final form that bore the self evident stamp of authenticity and rightness that its timid builders could not find it in themselves to arrive at by more rational means.