Drawing the Invisible Cities. Notes on a Game of Chess

A book, therefore, like an architecture: equipped with an idea of form and structure, above all with a make-up of meaning that portrays the timeless inevitability of facts and questions that - always and forever - belong to urban life: the destiny of the very existence of men inextricably linked to the built place, which is its reflection. The reflection of a figure that portrays events, tumults, silences, celebrations and mourning, virtues and sins, weaknesses, visions, ambitions, aspirations, arrogance, negligence, prevarications, recklessness, the culmination points of a civil history and the descents into dark declines, the splendor of golden goals, the ashes of burned histories and, nevertheless, always promises of new beginnings, in any time, in the cities that once were, in those that will be and in what they are. Those same cities, told by Calvino, which surprise us with their relevance, because the imagination of cities that belong to an un-historical time is fueled by the gaze of eyes that know how to see the present and, perhaps, prefigure the future.