The Shadow-World

His frizzy beard hairs were swaying slightly in the pleasant, surprisingly warm breeze whilst he, wrapped up in his coat, strolled along the, geometrically layed out to criss-cross each other, cement paths. He had pulled his hat down over his forehead in order to compensate for having forgot his sunglasses. Lavender and reed stalks, whose bushes flourished in the non cement-covered areas between the paths, had also been persuaded into swaying. The sun hung low in the firmament and all that was alive rejoiced at her generous donation of warmth. Children were rollicking, balls were barking and dogs were rolling, or was it the other way around? Maple trees shone in their orange, and gingko trees in their yellow, pyramid shaped crowns.

The park, over whose paths he was strolling, was delimited by sky-scrapers. Out of the lined up, domino-like grey-blue glass cuboids, three in particular stood out, both metaphorically and literally.

In the South, the 31 c-shaped floors of the Unicredit building half-circuled, with their concave side, the to Gae Aulenti dedicated circular square. At one end of the glass construction, a glass spiral, which ended in a porcupine-quill-like

shape, shot into the air, of which one might assume its function be the impalement of airplanes.

In the North, the twin block “Standing Gardens”, whose facades were adorned with hundreds of balconies planted with little trees and bushes, kept each other company. These were the proud posterchildren of Milan's ecological architecture initiative. Autumn had left its mark on these diminutive decorative plants and so the normally monotonous, grey-slabbed walls were covered with a sort of living, speckled wallpaper, a patchwork of every shade of green, yellow and orange in the colour spectrum.

Meanwhile he had reached the south-eastern corner of the park where a, to him previously unknown, maple tree, shining in its autumn attire, aroused his attention. He just about managed to lift his camera up to his eye and take a picture before, suddenly, his surroundings were robbed of their magic and jolly charisma. The sun had disappeared early behind the buildings in the West of the city; and with it all the, now past, day’s light, hope and warmth. Now the Shadow-World had the run of the place.