On the 4th of September of 1997, the architect Aldo Rossi died in Milan following a road accident. Aged 66, he was at the peak of his career: in 1990 he had been awarded the Pritzker Prize, he had construction sites running around the world, and important projects awaiting realization. At the height of his success he began writing his secret autobiography – which would be published in English before Italian, under the title Scientific Autobiography – that he began by saying: “Around 1960 I wrote The Architecture of the City, a successful book. At that time, I was not yet thirty years old, and I wanted to write a definitive work: it seemed to me that everything, once clarified, could be defined.”

In reality, what then seemed a sure thing would turn out to be so complicated that it became the labyrinth which still shrouds his figure in an uncertain, almost legendary way, to the point of clouding his story and making the memory of him fade away into some distant, archaic past...[+]