curated by Enrico Stefanelli

“The man who travels and does not yet know the city awaiting him along his route, wonders what the palace will be like, the barracks, the mill, the theatre, the bazaar. In every city of the empire every building is different and set in a different order: but as soon as the stranger arrives in the unknown city and he sees the pine cone of pagodas and garrets and haymows, following the scrawl of canals, gardens and rubbish heaps, he immediately distinguishes which are the princes’ palaces, the high priests’ temples, the tavern, the prison, the slum. This–some say–confirms the hypothesis that each man carries a city in his mind made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities become crowded […] You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.” (Italo Calvino)