An Atlas Of Hyperreal Cities And Where To Find Them

November 12, 2014 5:59 PM

On Umberto Eco's latest book of imaginary maps to legendary lands.
posted by The Whelk (10 comments total)

I just bought this book to practice my Italian! It's beautiful, and the Italian doesn't seem too difficult - the language is much more straight-forward than I was expecting from a professor of semiotics. I plan to dive into it this weekend.
posted by kanewai at 6:04 PM on November 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

Well that went straight to the hold list at the library. Thanks!
posted by echo target at 6:29 PM on November 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

Amazon customers who bought The Book of Legendary Lands also bought:

• Codex Seraphinianus

posted by Phssthpok at 6:37 PM on November 12, 2014 [9 favorites]

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places is another good 'un in this subgenre. (Yet another Italian wrote it in collaboration with an Argentine. Italians seem just generally into imaginary lands.)
posted by Iridic at 6:44 PM on November 12, 2014 [4 favorites]

See also the beautiful Map of Humanity (previously)
posted by Rhaomi at 7:06 PM on November 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

One of the authors whose works i nearly immediately buy. thanks for the post
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:59 PM on November 12, 2014

"imaginary maps to legendary lands. "

"Map of Iceland"

o_O
posted by Kattullus at 1:10 AM on November 13, 2014 [6 favorites]

Seconding Dictionary of Imaginary Places. That's more of an encyclopedia of "fictional countries from lots of other people's literature and music" - Narnia, Middle-Earth, each of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities", Erewhon, and Pepperland are all on the list. If they were writing today they'd probably include Pleasantville.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:40 AM on November 13, 2014

The map of the star-shaped city of Palmanova in Italy is from the beautiful, six volume collection called Civitates Orbis Terrarum (Cities of the World). I found a few of the volumes in high-resolution PDF format at the collection of the University of Granada under a CC license, but their servers seem to be slow and sometimes unresponsive, so be gentle with your downloading.
posted by chambers at 4:51 AM on November 13, 2014

"imaginary maps to legendary lands. "

"Map of Iceland"

o_O

Iceland is a performance art agitprop project developed in 1974 by a Situationist International splinter group that was unhappy with the group's 1972 dissolution.
posted by Sangermaine at 7:45 AM on November 13, 2014 [3 favorites]