I shall start with the clump of buildings situated around the complicated crossroads called Le 5 Vie ("the five streets") where there remains what I beheve to be the only trace of the lacerations of the war: a stump of tears and pain that has been resisting ghostily for 71 years. I live in this neighbourhood, and relish the Sunday silence of abandoned offices. It is an area of aristocratic palazzi and triumphal balconies. Legend has it that the poet Ugo Foscolo climbed up one of them, across from my house, to reach the rooms of his beloved (his arnica risanata) in Palazzo Fagnani, which is where much more recently, Noorda and Vignelli's glorious Unimark had its luxurious headquarters. Let's start from here and allow ourselves to take a winding, zigzag path. A city where streets are incomplete in their convergence, where places are crooked, piazzas too big (as the much-quoted Carlo Emilio Gadda used to say) and where the culture of building is great, allows us to do just that.
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