Unfamiliar quarters, distant cities

"Marco Polo imagined answering...
that the more one was lost
in the unfamiliar quarters of distant cities,
the more one understood the other cities
he had crossed to arrive there;
and he traced the stages of his journeys,
and he came to know the port from which he had set sail,
and the familiar places of his youth,
and the surroundings of home,
and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child."

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

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