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 yet another mixture of architecture and earth, a conscious combination of the conflict between the reason and the uncanny, adventure and comfort, memories of the city and sylvan ways of life. The term selva denotes precise and concrete realities and multiple imaginaries but also indicates the possible trajectory of future time as well as the turning towards a very distant past: it is an arrow whose direction establishes the connotations of a possible new contrat naturel.