“This idea of the city as an encyclopaedic discourse, as the collective memory, is part of a whole tradition: think of the Gothic cathedrals in which every architectural and ornamental detail, every space and element, referred to notions which were part of a global wisdom, was a sign that found echoes in other contexts. In the same way we can ‘read’ the city as a reference work, just as we read Notre-Dame, capital by capital, pluvial after pluvial. And at the same time we can read the city as the collective unconscious: the collective unconscious is a huge catalogue, an enormous bestiary; we can interpret Paris as a book of dreams, an album of our unconscious, a catalogue of horrors.”
Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris. Autobiographical Writings, Vintage, London, 2004, p.173.
