Tuscany Beyond Tuscany: Rethinking the City from the Periphery

playing with words [‘Non dico che sia una bella storia. È la Storia’]. In this respect, the volume effectively captures the sense of Munari’s ‘perturbazione cibernetica’, to use again Eco’s words, where nature becomes an epistemological tool for the artist, as brilliantly argued by Antonello. It goes without saying that, by the time Eco and Munari reflected upon this relationship with nature, they did not mean that nature that we see every day by perceptive habit, but that which we conceptually define in the laboratory. And therefore, by meaning ‘nature’ in the only correct possible sense, art does not imitate nature, but our way of interpreting and defining nature, imitating our operational relationship with nature, imitating nature as an ‘oggetto possibile di una nostra definizione che sa di definire non definitivamente’. Research, experimentation, opentextuality, total art, political awareness: if Calvino has inspired the title of this volume, in light of the many associations one can identify between his style and Munari’s, it is through Eco’s perceptive gaze that we can fully grasp the wonderful portrait of the Milanese artist.