Venice is well-known, its identity is so familiar to be considered obvious, summarized as if it were a replicable logo: the city shows its face leaving behind its backbone. Here gold and mud blend together, moulding a multifaceted document. In Venice an endless interchange between real and imaginary, original and fake, tiny and huge, powerful and fragile endures, while we look at the city as a shimmering object. The alter ego of what is well-known and obvious becomes superlative, since it exceeds predetermined standards; furthermore, it represents the inconceivable condensed in the prefix of another language as it is revealed only when one ...

The sylva returns both as an image, capable of distilling the character of places and the modalities of crossing them, and a reality: forests are advancing in some territories, and the concrete presence of wild and untamed areas within cities is a constantly expanding fact. The two levels of reading of the sylva – the one taking it as a figuration through which to interpret reality and the other analysing it as actual space – require a codification of the tools and modes of inhabiting such an unknown locus. The return of the sylvan marks the return of a new sense of the ‘archaic’, of ...