Ylenia Maria Citino and Giacomo Delledonne
"The city 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..."
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)
Capital cities, like the imagined metropolises in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, are palimpsests
of constitutional meaning and can indeed be referred to as “Westphalian constructs”
(Boggero in this issue). They do not speak their constitutional role explicitly, but it is
imprinted in their spatial order, institutional density, symbolic architecture, and political
function. [...]
