Caltula

After Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

I will now tell you about Caltula, the city of pennants. 

In Caltula, long strings hang from casement ledges under second story windows and from the eaves of steep turret roofs and from the tips of tall, thin flagstaffs, and sag low over the narrow streets. Pennants hang from the strings; these are dyed bright solid colors or woven in bold tartan patterns or embroidered with lush, sweeping brocade, or else with folkloric illustrations, or miniature pastoral scenes, or the sigils of gods local and foreign, or the likenesses and slogans of candidates for municipal office, or advertisements for nearby shops, or many other things. 

Weavers, cloth-dyers, needleworkers, and other such people are held in very high regard in Caltula, their services being in demand by citizens both low and genteel for the fashioning of many bespoke pennants, often to exacting specifications and at indulgent prices. Regardless of the design or pattern they’ve been commissioned to create, however, all pennant-makers in Caltula must cut their cloth into the exact same thin-pointed triangle shape, the standard dimensions for pennants having been established and legally codified in antiquity. 

Once a pennant is hung, regardless of whoever may have commissioned it or conceived its design, it becomes common property, and may be plucked and rehung on the whim of a passerby or the string it hangs on moved as convenience demands. Be this as it may, the commissioner is almost always satisfied knowing that their pennant is flying somewhere in the city, adding to the great vexillological tumult of Caltulan civil life. If luck smiles on them, they may one day catch another glimpse of the pennant they once paid so handsomely for; it’s said that whoever rediscovers a pennant in this way will have good fortune all year long. 

In Caltula, next-door-over neighbors are not nearly so familiar as across-the-street neighbors, because the latter depend on one another to keep aloft the strings of pennants running between their houses. The daily maintenance of the strings and their fastenings is in fact an important matter of neighborly courtesy, such that at various times one can see shopkeepers and househusbands leaning out of their windows and tightening knots or rehammering nails with performative vigor. 

Walking the streets of Caltula, visitors should expect to duck under a drooping string of pennants every several steps, and on the best-traveled streets, they may even need to lift great, grimy tangles of rope and cloth over their heads to pass underneath. Such great knots of strings and pennants have been known to form on some streets that ladders are nailed to the adjacent exterior walls, allowing couriers and hasty youths to pass the obstruction without needing to make a detour. On other streets, pennants are hung higher but even more thickly, forming a canopy that obscures the sky from view. On these streets, colors and patterns accost the eye from every angle. Some visitors to Caltula report seeing pennants in their dreams for weeks after leaving.

When pennants become soiled or soaked after rain, they’re plucked from their strings and brought inside to be washed in great vats of boiling lye water, then put out on clotheslines to dry. It's expected that the laundered pennants will be meticulously taken down and hung again on the strings they previously occupied, but it’s just as likely that the launderer will mistake their clothesline for a proper string and leave it where it hangs, the pennants curling and snapping in the wind.