There are cities that have stopped making promises and started taking action. Fifteen medium-sized and large cities — from Aarhus to Warsaw, from Barcelona to Stavanger — demonstrate that effective, prudent and inclusive urban management is not a utopia, but a verifiable reality. This book explains how these cities operate without rhetoric or propaganda, drawing on verifiable data, operational projects and concrete examples. Written without sector-specific jargon, the book is accessible to both professionals and interested members of the public, offering examples that are geographically, climatically and administratively close to home. These are neither utopian ideals nor visionary projects. They are initiatives already in operation, often at modest cost, and replicable in similar contexts. The book does not celebrate wealthy cities, but those that have set clear priorities and pursued them consistently. It is a useful, well-researched, narrative-driven and European book. It speaks to those who govern, those who plan, those who teach and those who live there.

Pino Bruno is a journalist and writer. He has worked as an editor at ANSA, a war correspondent for RAI in Iraq, Somalia and the Balkans, and deputy editor-in-chief at TGR; for Rai Tre, he conceived and edited the programmes ‘Levante’ and ‘Est-Ovest’. He specialises in technological innovation, the digital society and urban models. He divides his time between Bari and Copenhagen, where he explores issues relating to urban functioning and the quality of public infrastructure. His publications include Le parole della Rete (Mondadori Informatica, 2001), Il cittadino digitale (Mondadori Informatica, 2002), Mouse? No grazie (with Marco De Salvo, Mondadori Informatica, 2004) and Dolce Stil Web (Sperling & Kupfer, 2009).

Motus <> Botto&Bruno

Following the format of the first issue of Echos, which presented a comparison between two artists – Romeo Castellucci and Alfredo Jaar – and between theatre and contemporary art, this third issue brings together Motus and Botto&Bruno. Both are couples in their professional and personal lives: on the one hand, Daniela Nicolò and Enrico Casagrande, founders of Motus, one of the most important and committed companies in Italian and international experimental theatre; on the other, Roberta Bruno and Gianfranco Botto, an admired artistic duo with an extraordinary career.

Many common threads can be identified in their respective careers: their studies at the Academy, their early careers, performances and exhibitions drawing on similar sources of inspiration, the Venice Biennale, and their appearances across half the world. But equally striking are their shared focus on the stories of urban peripheries, their exploration of myth, and their references to Pasolini. In terms of artistic language, one must not overlook both artists’ use of collage, photography and video. Naturally, the reader may look for certain differences between them – differences that serve to complete a fascinating identity.

Motus was founded in 1991 as a nomadic, independent company, constantly moving between countries, historical periods and artistic disciplines. Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò, driven by the need to engage with contemporary issues, conflicts and wounds, blend art and social commitment on stage.

Gianfranco Botto (1963) and Roberta Bruno (1966), known professionally as Botto & Bruno, live and work in Turin. From the very beginning of their collaboration, the artistic duo has primarily used the camera as a means of investigation, deconstructing photography through the use of collage, overprinting and drawing. Having both been born and raised in suburban neighbourhoods, they have treated marginality as a cultural theme in their search for new forms of vitality and poetry.

The volume recounts and illustrates the project of the same name, which brought a new cultural offering to Umbria during the summer of 2024, enlivening the region with extraordinary initiatives spanning the ancient and the contemporary. From 15 June, for the first time, it was possible to visit Umbria's fourteen national museums, where contemporary art exhibitions alternated with major exhibitions, performances and installations designed specifically for the various sites, stimulating the eyes and minds of the public. Archaeological parks, Etruscan and Lombard treasures, masterpieces from the Middle Ages and the Baroque period, prehistoric finds and wonderful Renaissance gardens were enriched by dialogue with the work of masters of our time.

This volume presents the second edition of PUSH THE LIMITS, an exhibition project by Fondazione Merz curated by Claudia Gioia and Beatrice Merz. The exhibition explores art's ability to respond to current and urgent issues and to bring about change, rejecting resignation to immobility. It brings together 20 artists from different generations and backgrounds who make the overcoming and transformation of imposed and supposed limits their artistic grammar.

In renaming the second edition of PUSH THE LIMITS, Mario Merz's phrase, “Culture strips itself bare and reveals war”, has been added. The reference is to the traditionally complex role of culture in situations of conflict and the need for culture to strip itself of its muffled image in order to highlight its combative nature. This also serves to emphasise the freedom and responsibility of art and culture, as well as the goal of pushing boundaries, especially today, when all the principles of coexistence and law are constantly being overturned, so that new words can emerge to start thinking again in terms of justice and international, social and civil relations.

The exhibition, open from 27 October 2025 to 8 March 2026, features works by the following artists: Heba Y. Amin, Maja Bajević, Mirna Bamieh, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Rossella Biscotti, Monica Bonvicini, Latifa Echakhch, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh/Rozenn Quéré, Cécile B. Evans, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Jasleen Kaur, Katerina Kovaleva, Teresa Margolles, Helina Metaferia, Janis Rafa, Zineb Sedira and Nora Turato.

Through dates, personalities and generational transitions, Filiu describes the scenario of one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes since the Second World War. The tragic current events in Gaza have unfortunately obscured the long history of this prosperous oasis, which since ancient times has been involved in the affairs of all the empires in the region. It was in 1948 that the fate of this ancient land was overturned, reduced to a strip of territory, first administered by Egypt and then, two decades later, occupied by the State of Israel. Mother of the fedayeen and cradle of the Intifada, Gaza has since played a decisive role, for better or worse, in Palestinian nationalism. Far from being merely a besieged enclave, Gaza holds the key to peace or war in the complex Middle Eastern framework, because it is there that both Israel's security and Palestine's future are at stake. The research carried out in this volume, in its first translation into Italian, is unrivalled in terms of the breadth of its documentation and goes beyond historical reflection on one of the major political crises of our time to cover contemporary developments.

Jean Pierre Filiu is a university professor of Middle Eastern history and the author of seminal essays, including Mitterand et la Palestine (Fayard, 2005), Main basse sur Israël (La Découverte, 2019) and Comment la Palestine fut perdue (Seuil, 2024). He contributes to Le Monde, publishing the column Un si proche Orient on the newspaper's website, which is followed by millions of readers.

It all began in September 364 AD, with what the Greek governess Baubo dared to tell the Roman emperor Flavius Valentinianus before going to sleep. Between imperial Milan and the mysteries of Eleusis, while the Germans were being fought off at the border, in the feverish emperor's room, stories dedicated to the mysteries of the goddess Demeter and Persephone, Mother and Daughter, stories that are still unknown, were whispered. Francesca Sensini, opting for the ancestral tone that moves the act of laughter, brings its resonances to deeply sabotage our vision of the Western epochal transition from paganism to Christianity, helping us to see our cultural and anthropological continuity with the primordial world of myths from a different perspective. The combination of the feminine generative principle, universal fertility, and the tension that emerges between the darkness of power and the brightness of laughter are actions that the author performs with skilful simplicity and lightness, masterfully suggesting a fundamental and very complex shift with far-reaching emotional and cultural effects.

Francesca Sensini, writer, lecturer and researcher, is currently an associate professor of Italian Studies at the Université Côte d'Azur in Nice. Trained as a classicist, she devotes most of her research to Italian literature between the 19th and 20th centuries, studies of classical reception and gender studies in literature. Born in Genoa in 1974, after graduating in Classical Literature, she moved to France, where she continued her studies, obtaining a PhD in Italian Studies at the Paris-Sorbonne University and teaching at various universities, living first in Paris for ten years and then in Nice. Her publications include La guerra è stupida (Gammarò, 2020), Pascoli maledetto (Il Nuovo Melangolo, 2020), La lingua degli dei. L'amore per il greco antico e moderno (Il Nuovo Melangolo, 2021), La Trama di Elena (Ponte alle Grazie, 2023) and Afrodite viaggia leggera (Ponte alle Grazie, 2024).