Milan, always the thermometer of the country. Milan-Italy. The city where dreams still resist, where sometimes they are destroyed and sometimes come true. A city that is famous, misunderstood, offended, regretted or desired. Problematic or welcoming, mysterious or surprising. The capital of fashion, design, advertising: Milan, a metropolis with many firsts, both positive and negative, is a city that continuously sheds its skin. The present teems with challenges – urban planning, the environment, culture, human problems – and the twenty-six protagonists of this series of interviews, who are Milanese by birth or adoption, trace a detailed and varied map of the city. The search for excellence, good quality of life, the capacity to welcome newcomers, then, solidarity, a civil use of architecture or the desire to once again give cultural élan to a city that boasts extraordinary examples in theatre and music, in publishing and in research. These are among the crucial themes dealt with by these people. Starting from their own experience, possible solutions are often delineated and feasible paths pointed out, at times with a critical spirit and the intention to spur the city’s administrators to do more and better. But the city where one is born or lives at length is also a place of the soul: in fact, in their recollections Milan becomes their “very own” city, each time reborn, the same and different, in their memories. Each one evokes in his or her own way an atmosphere, a neighbourhood, a piece of history or a lost odour, until put together these fragments complete a vivid and coherent puzzle. From the Milan of Strehler and the Piccolo to the temple of the Scala, from the comicality of the mythical Derby to the beginnings of Made in Italy, from the creation of the first Italian research institute to the massacre of Piazza Fontana, from the gloom of the Seventies to the roaring Eighties, right up to the judicial earthquake of Mani Pulite (the 1992 corruption scandal that involved an entire political class). But there are also the famous songs, the first TV spots and the great publishing adventures. And then, the present, with its difficult nature and identity crisis, but full of invention and new openings. Multiculturality and immigration, the right to education, work that reinvents itself, the thousand facets of the health services and, for all, the aspiration to and search for an improved quality of life.