what is a city?

 what is a city?

This question had already been asked to me in my university, and personally I had made my own the answer that great architects and great writers had made: I had found the answer in various books and comparing the answer with what I felt, such as, for example, Italo Calvino tells the cities through “invisible cities”, where the starting point and the conclusion of each chapter is the dialogue between Marco Polo and the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan, who questions the explorer about the cities of his immense empire. The book consists of nine chapters, but there is a further internal division: each of the 55 cities is divided according to a category, 11 in total, from the “cities and the memory” to the “hidden cities”.

But the definition that I feel most mine is the one of Aldo Rossi, who defines the city as an organism made up of architectural units that become the “fixed scene in the theater of human life”, from his book “the architecture of the cities”. Today, however, the cities of my country are no longer the theater of humanity. My Italy is in difficult after the emergence of the coronavirus, now the streets, cinemas, squares and everything that made the city alive is closed, now it’s all a ghost landscape. 

Right now, in this difficult moment, we must never forget that the city is our theater and we are all actors, for when will be bettere moments.