The cities
Each city in Calvino’s book is a small argument about memory, or desire, or the way a place is really the version of itself you carry away from it.
Marco and Kublai
What I had forgotten — or perhaps never noticed — is how much of the book is silence between the two men. The cities are described, and then the description is allowed to settle, and the silence does most of the work.
Why spring
Spring is a Calvino season. Everything is provisional. The cities, like the trees, are rebuilding themselves out of what they remember of last year.