Metropoli gathers some of the most important series in Gabriele Basilico’s oeuvre, from his first important collection, Milano. Ritratti di fabbriche, followed by Beirut photographed in 1991 and in 2011, the Sezioni del paesaggio italiano in 1996, up to the final city views from around the world.

Metropoli may be considered a summary of Basilico’s ideas: Photographing a city doesn’t mean choosing the best architecture and isolating it from its context to enhance an aesthetic or compositional dimension, but rather it means the exact opposite for me. That is, putting high-brow architecture on the same level as ordinary architecture, creating a place of coexistence, because true cities, the cities I’m interested in, contain all these elements between excellence and mediocrity, between the centre and the outskirts, even in the most recent recomposition of roles: a vision of urban space that, with a bit of rhetoric, would once have been called democratic .

Published for the exhibition in Rome, this monograph presents contributions by Roberta Valtorta, Marc Auge, Luca Doninelli, Giovanna Calvenzi and Filippo Maggia.

Gabriele Basilico (Milan, 1944-2013) began taking pictures in the early 1970s and, after graduating in architecture, focused with dedication on cities and cityscapes. He won numerous awards and took part in countless documentation projects both in Italy and abroad, with accompanying exhibitions and publications, including Porti di mare (1990), L'esperienza dei luoghi (1994), Sezioni del paesaggio Italiano (1998), Interrupted City (1999), Cityscapes (1999), Scattered City (2005), Intercity (2007), Mosca Verticale (2008). Skira has published Silicon Valley (2007), Urbanscapes (2014) and Ascolto il tuo cuore, citta (2015).