This was a student project completed during my Master's program in Visual Design at Scuola Politecnica di Milano in collaboration with Oliva Delsart, a fellow student.
The Brief
Design a new system for the way Touring Club Italiano travel guides are being made and used to fit the needs of a contemporary audience.
Our Concept
City Narratives is a beautifully made book guiding the reader through the city with a collection of stories, movies, music, photography, maps, smells, sounds and people, old and new. The format is a personal scrapbook of a writer or artist in a given city. It would be composed of unrelated chapters of the narrator’s findings in the city.
City Narratives offers the reader an experience that is impossible to get online.
The Writer
For each city, a new writer/artist would be assigned with new contents but always following the structure we have put together in the book.
The Reader
City Narratives is meant to be read before traveling to a chosen destination. It is a valuable book that will be kept by the traveler instead of being tossed or never looked at again after the trip.
City Narratives is not a city guide. It is a book about a city.
The book is divided into 7 chapters as follows:
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I
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The Imagined City
Extracts from different media about the city that forms the writer’s preconceptions of the city before traveling.
+ Books written about Milan
+ Songs written about Milan
+ Movies filmed in Milan
+ Google Images search of Milan vs/ Milano
II
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The Personal City
The writer’s personal experience of the city in the form of short stories and personal encounters.
+ One of the short stories entitled Gems Under Concrete Giants
III
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The Nostalgic City
Touring Club Italiano has an amazing collection of old maps and photographs. In this section, we compare the past to the present.
+ Comparing the map of Nord Milano (the north of Milan) by superimposing a map from Google Maps on a map from 1914
+ Comparing a photo of the same Sex Shop by using tracing paper and superimposing a photo of the façade from 1976 on the current one
IV
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The City of Senses
The writer talks about the city in terms of senses. What does the city smell/sound/ taste like.
+ A detail from the section The Smell of Milan
V
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The Utopic City
Here the writer talks about people who are making serious changes for the better of the city.
+ A detail from one of the spreads
VI
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Art of the City
A showcase of influential people in the creative field.
+ Architects From Milan
+ Poets From Milan
+ Designers From Milan
+ Writers From Milan
+ Photographers From Milan
VII
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Mapping the City
A series of personal maps made by people living in Milan
+ A detail of one of the personal maps
+ We also added spreads with one letter of the alphabet and a typically Milanese word corresponding to it. These spreads were randomly inserted into the book. Here is a detail of S for Sbagliato
+ We also added an glossary at the end of the book to define all the Italian terms we used thorughout the book.
