coupling Phyllis, you take pleasure to observe how different from each other by bridges channels: a humpbacked bridges, covered, on pillars, on boats, suspended, with pierced parapets, many varieties of windows overlook the ways: mullioned, Moorish, lanceolate, pointed arch, surmounted by lunettes or roses, how many kinds of floor covering the soil with pebbles, slabs, of gravel, a blue and white tiles. At every point the city offers surprises to the eye: a bunch of capers that protrudes from the walls of the fortress, the statues of three queens on a shelf, an onion dome onion stuck with three on the spire. "Happy is he who has Phyllis every day under the eyes and never fails to see the things it contains," cried with regret at having to leave the city after it touched only with his eyes.
happen to you instead of stopping to Phyllis and spend the rest of your days. Soon the city fades in your eyes, clears the rosettes, the statues on the corbels, the domes. Like all the inhabitants of Phyllis, you follow zigzag lines from a track to another, distinguish areas of sun and shadows, here a door, a ladder, a bench where you can place the racks in a ditch where your foot stumbles if you do not mind you. The rest of the city is invisible. Phyllis is a space where you draw paths between points suspended in space, the shortest way to reach the tent of that deaf avoiding the door of that creditor. Your steps chase what is not out of the eyes, but inside, buried and removed: if one of two porches continues to look more cheerful because it is one in which the past thirty years is a girl with large embroidered sleeves, or is it just because it receives light at a certain hour like the porch that you do not remember where it was.
Millions of eyes rises up windows bridges capers and it's like sliding on a white page. There are many cities like Phyllis who are fleeing from view except that if a surprise.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities , p. 97-98
