Fals tratat de geografie sau Despre seducţia călătoriilor
Fake Treaty on Geography or On the Seductiveness of Traveling

Summary/Abstract: To define non-space as a tribute to the urban world we used the two works that belong to Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities and Marcovaldo. The commercial, poetic and lyrical non-space in the novel Invisible Cities corresponds to the commercial and psychological non-space in Marcovaldo or Seasons in the City. Marcovaldo, un urban explorer – a new type of Marco Polo – goes daily to the supermarket together with his family, he loads a cart with everything he would like to buy, then in the evening, when the store is empty, leaves everything on the shelves, because he has no money to buy anything. The visit to the shop gives him psychological comfort: he got inside it, walked among the potential customers, then quit. Marco Pole tells the Great Han, using some symbolic object, his trips through the imaginary towns with names of women. The two characters live in a world that they have created themselves. Maybe, neither Marco Polo ever left his town, he only dreamed to make a trip to the Orient, nor Marcovaldo entered a supermarket, he only visited websites of online stores offer. Both characters live in a commercial and poetic world, in the same time, trying to meet people who have common interests with them, a world that turns into an imaginary one, governed by symbols. Marco Pole is attracted by remote spaces, being a romantic character, while Marcovaldo explores the contingent, the world we already know, a fascinating world of color and advertisements. This is the similarity between non-space created to sell goods to the cyberspace, which is designed as a virtual living environment in which many remain cloister. Cyberspace is populated by explorers who, like Marco (Polo or –Valdo) claim to describe the virtual world as a phenomenological one. We considered non-space is part of the cyberspace, together with para-space (the alternative space), but it is, as well, a concept which has, through literature, its own evolution, defining modern world, places that have no identity, but which we can speak about.

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