"But what is the city for us today? I think that I wrote something like a last love poem for the cities, at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to live in 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; to write another one would be excessive, and such a thing does not suit my character. What my own Marco Polo wants to discover are the hidden causes that can apply beyond any crisis. Cities are a collection of things: memories, desires, signs of a language; cities are places of exchange, as explained by all the books of economics, but these exchanges are not only exchanges of goods, they are also exchanges of words, desires, memories. My book opens and closes with images of happy cities that constantly change shape and get lost, hidden within unhappy cities..."