"Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer's house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales, the grocer's. Statues and shields depict lions, dolphins, towers, stars: a sign that something-- who knows what?-- has as its sign a lion or a dolphin or a tower or a star. . . . If a building has no signboard or figure, its very form and the position it occupies in the city's order suffice to indicate its function: the palace, the prison, the mint, the Pythagorean school, the brothel. The wares, too, which the vendors display on their stalls are valuable not in themselves but as signs of other things: the embroidered headband stands for elegance; the gilded planquin, power . . . Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages . . . However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs , whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it. "

from: The Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino