Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.

Meaning of the quote

As you travel to different places, you may notice that they start to look more and more alike. Each city starts to resemble the others, and the locations lose their unique shapes, patterns, and distances. It's as if a shapeless cloud of dust has spread across the continents, making everything seem the same.

About Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was an acclaimed Italian writer and journalist known for his bestselling works like the Our Ancestors trilogy, Cosmicomics, and novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter’s night a traveler. He was the most translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death and is buried in Tuscany.

More about the author

More quotes from Italo Calvino

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.

Italo Calvino

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In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

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The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.

Italo Calvino

Italian journalist and writer (1923-1985)