"But what is the city for us today? I think I wrote something like the last love poem for 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 prophesy disasters and revelations; writing another one would be redundant and such a thing does not suit my character. What my own Marco Polo wants to discover are the hidden causes that can exist beyond and above any crisis. Cities are a collection of things: memories, desires, signs of a language; cities are places of exchanges, as all economic books explain, 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 disappear, hidden within unhappy cities..."