"Energy is eternal delight"
William Blake

"Detto questo, e' inutile stabilire se Zenobia sia da classificare tra le citta' felici o tra quelle infelici. Non e' in queste due specie che ha senso dividere le citta', ma in altre due: quelle che continuano attraverso gli anni e le mutazioni a dare la loro forma ai desideri e quelle in cui i desideri o riescono a cancellare la citta' o ne sono cancellati".
Italo Calvino- Le citta' sottili

"As this wave from memories flows in, the city soak it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira's past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentation, scrolls".
Italo Calvino- Cities and Memory

"Flanerie is a kind of reading of the street, in which faces, shop front, shop windows, cafe' terraces, street cars, automobiles and tree become a wealth of equally valid letters of the alphabet that together result in words, sentences and pages of an ever-new book. In order to engage in flanerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind".
Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin (1929)