Last year I was in America, specifically in New York.

I landed in the evening at JFK airport and reached my residence for the short holiday in America in New Jersey; only the following morning did I take the bus to the Big Apple...

That morning the sky was completely covered in fog, so I spent the short bus ride drawing words on the foggy glass. 

We arrived in New York through a tunnel that passes under the Hudson River which separates the Manhattan peninsula from the rest of America. The bus still shrouded in fog stopped us on the fifth floor of a deserted and dark car park; I followed the guy who was sitting next to me and who had continued to stare at the dark seat in front for the entire journey and we found ourselves on an escalator heading towards the subway... slowly I began to hear voices, the first sounds since I left home beyond the sudden braking and acceleration of the bus which had made me feel sick with my fingers pressed against the glass...

Under the ground, suddenly, a swarm of people as in a human anthill: this was my first encounter with the Americans... 

A little annoyed by the strange smells trapped under the earth which, unable to release themselves into the air, gave rise to strange mixtures of hot dogs and red roses, of (frozen) pizza and caramelized almonds, I continued to follow, clashing with everyone, my silent Cicerone who was very good, however, at zigzagging among the people.

I had just entered the Big Apple and I already wanted to get out of it... so I accelerated my pace (and the clashes) abandoning the strange guy and following my breathing which perceived the new air...

I'm outside... but I can't see the sky... and the feeling is immediately that of having ended up in that film: "Blade Runner". Huge advertising signs, white smoke puffing up from the ground in several places (it's the air conditioning) and a diaphanous sound in the background... I run to the center of the road and raise my gaze until the back of my neck hurts... only then among angular and shiny geometric figures do I see a piece of blue... only for a few seconds because that position with the nose turned up is not natural.

I am forced to lower my head and I realize that I am in front of the famous Broadway theater where they have always been repeating the same show for more than a quarter of a century; I turn and my gaze falls everywhere on the opaque walls of the buildings or I end up seeing myself multiplied everywhere on the glass surfaces...

The streets intersect in angular areas and the open spaces are reduced to a minimum and without sun... In a vertical city the concept of space of its inhabitants is inevitably different: museums, theatres, stadiums, gyms, discos all inside...

Now I understand why for all the days of the trip I continued to desire what all visitors to the Big Apple desire: to climb the Empire State Building because only from there you can see the sky... and there at the highest point where you would like to let yourself go below and finally feel the space, if it weren't for the iron cage that protects you, I found myself thinking about Greece and its architecture... 

Certainly the choice of the site, and therefore the relationship between the work and the natural space, was the main problem of the Greek architects, and it did not derive only from a naturalistic conception of architecture, but from the firm belief that the works had to be "open".

Open space was an existential property of the Greeks as well as a purely architectural choice: they conceived the infinite as an explosion, as an opening, and rejected (or did not recognize) the infinitely small which has so fascinated our time...

The architects therefore had the apparently paradoxical task of building open spaces: architecture became the hedge through which the unlimited was perceived, it became the voice of man in the infinite silence, so that the boundaries of their works became the trees, the mountains, the sea.

The gaze did not have to rest anywhere; the light, the outside that could be perceived through the columns of the temple portico were always present, their works were not refuges, the world was not scary. 

Not heavy walls as in our theaters or our underground gyms where the gaze continually refers back into oneself and ours is the era of psychoanalysis and the individual, but the surrounding space, with its noises and colors and, above all, with its extension.

Greek man perceives open space as a mental place and the Other becomes an infinite to know, a challenge, so architecture is inextricably linked to meetings and assemblies and becomes, at the same time, an expression of a need and a desired choice...

The theatre, the gymnasiums, the squares are structures conceived with this spirit, the outside is already freedom, there is no exit-escape, and these places thus become spaces of discussion and dialogue, life takes place in the agora which becomes a symbol of this conception, the space is delimited only by public buildings, the built environment is reduced to a minimum: the Greeks want light and extension... a conception contrary to any individualistic attraction.

Thus active and constant participation in collective power becomes a will of the spirit, a goal to be achieved and not just a democratic need... "it is not security in their private pleasure that they seek, and freedom is not the guarantee granted by institutions to this pleasure, but it is participation"... 

The streets and squares fill up and politics becomes the greatest invention of these people, who do not fear confrontation and will indeed make dialogue their political form of open space. 

Outside, security vanishes, events became unrepeatable: a cloud that covered the sun and changed the colors in one moment made Oedipus say different things the next time his gaze turned to the scene, dazzled by the light; and the Choir in its evolutions would have been accompanied in an ever-different way by the singing of the birds and the rustling of the wind... there could be no habit and repetition...

This insecurity distances the Greeks from the desire to possess time (eternity) and pushes the athlete in the stadium to throw the discus higher than the sky because his whole life is contained in that moment in which the muscles tense until they break...

The port cities become the symbol of Greece: the line of the earth is concave as if drawn as a sign of embrace and welcome; but at the same time it is open to new experiences…