But what is the city to us today? I think that I wrote something like a final love poem for the cities, at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to experience them. The crisis of the very large city is the other side of the crisis of nature.

However, there are already many books that predict disasters and revelations; writing another one would be redundant, and that doesn't suit my character. What my Marco Polo wants to discover are the hidden causes that led people to live in cities, causes that can hold true beyond and above any crisis.

Cities are a collection of things: memories, desires, points of a language; cities are places of exchanges, as all economic books explain, but these exchanges are not merely exchanges of goods; they are also exchanges of words, desires, memories.

My book opens and closes with images of happy cities that continuously change shape and disappear, hidden within unhappy cities...

The book that many consider to be the masterpiece of the Italian Calvino in a new translation.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]