Welcome to Hidden Cities

Hidden Cities is a new magazine that illuminates the world, from politics to literature.

Part travelogue, part global news brief, Hidden Cities takes its name from Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, inspired by its sense of wonder at the world. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his he did not know,” Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan in one of Calvino’s imagined conversations between the Venetian explorer and Mongol emperor. “The foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”

Through writing that is grounded in place, Hidden Cities aims to inspire new thinking about the world that is curious, inquisitive, and compassionate, at a time when too many are looking inward, away from the world, fearful of foreign places and of “foreignness” itself. The magazine is committed to publishing writers from around the world, in their own voice and on their own terms, in essays, reporting, interviews, and other writing, including poetry.

Hidden Cities relies on the support of its readers. To help sustain this “little magazine” and independent journalism covering the world beyond the headlines, become a supporter today.

Founded and edited by Frederick Deknatel, Hidden Cities existed in an earlier form as a blog of stories from the Middle East, written mostly from Damascus and Cairo in the late 2000s. Freddy is a journalist, editor, and non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, where he writes about U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. From 2021 to 2025, he was the founding executive editor of Democracy in Exile, the journal of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). He was also previously the managing editor of World Politics Review and a staff editor at Foreign Affairs.