Andrea Guzzoletti’s tour of “Invisible Cities” borrows its title and its thematic structure from the brilliant prose-poem of the late Italo Calvino, Italy’s most imaginative 20th century writer. Le Citta Invisibili, published in 1972, was ostensibly an account of Marco Polo’s “conversations” with Kublai Khan – descriptions of the Mongol Empire’s far-flung capitals by a wandering merchant who knew the Great Khan’s immense realm better than the emperor himself. The two men shared no common language, and in Calvino’s rendition their exchanges revolve around largely non-verbal reactions to emblematic objects that Polo has acquired on the long road from Venice to China. It is left to the reader to interpret the responses that each object invokes in the emperor and his Venetian guide.

Beyond the acknowledged debt to Calvino stretch a long line of more purely musical resonances, dating back most notably to another celebrated Venetian, the Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi. Like Vivaldi in his lyrical portrait of the “Four Seasons,” the nine tracks of Guzzoletti’s “Invisible Cities” employ instruments and musical phrases to capture the soundscapes that define our experience of the physical world, often more distinctly and powerfully than the landmarks that serve as their backdrop.

Early in the genesis of this work, I spent a memorable day listening to parts of half a dozen tracks with Keane – an American writer and an Irish painter, both of us held in thrall by a musical composition that took its inspiration from literature and wielded its notes as though they were subtle brush strokes. We played a little game as we listened, speculating on real cities that seemed to emerge from Guzzoletti’s passages. Hong Kong and Tokyo came up, as I recall, along with New York and Paris. We thought we heard Sao Paolo and Bahia, and the vast megalopolises of Africa: Nairobi, Cairo and Lagos.

I can’t say why, exactly. There weren’t specific tonal references – none of the precise allusions to Broadway taxis or smoky Montparnasse bistros that act as signposts in George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and “American in Paris,” two other grand monuments in the line that leads to Andrea Guzzoletti. It was, rather, an inexplicable sensation of those places that his composition (and he and his extraordinary fellow musicians) provoked. A plunge into the very meaning of “city,” its mythic force and creative vitality, whether invisible and nameless or visible and named.

You can’t ask for more from an act of the imagination, whether its medium is music, words or paint.

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