An Open-Air Set: New York

You arrive in New York and you feel as if you've already been there, because so many of this city's views have been immortalised by the most varied films. A metropolis portrayed as paradise or hell: adorable, rich and welcoming as in Woody Allen's films; ruthless, tragic, apocalyptic as in the films of Scorsese, Ferrara, De Palma or Carpenter....and you feel like an actor moving on a set trodden thousands of times before: it's surprising, arriving in this city, to discover how well we know it thanks to the big screen.

As many as 13,000 films have been shot here, in the Big Apple where film sets are always at home, from Taxi Driver to After Hours, from Carlito's Way to After Hours, from King Kong to Godzilla, from American Psycho to the 25th Hour, from Breakfast at Tiffany's to It Happened One Night, from Spider-Man to Gangs of New York and then again Requiem for a Dream, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, The Godfather, Raging Bull, Independence Day, The Marathon Man, Bronx, Do the Right Thing, Barefoot in the Park, Madagascar, North by Northwest, Once Upon a Time in America, all Woody Allen's films! Navel of the world, land of dreams, bright and inviting, competitive and hard, with a heart of steel. Broadway, Central Park, the Statue of Liberty: clichés that make New York the most sung, loved, hated and photographed city in the world.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, because of the high land prices on the island of Manhattan, they began to build the skyscrapers that now, like absolute stars, rise towards the sky, giving a singular character to the city's morphology: some are very beautiful and singular and discovering them forces you to walk around often with your nose in the air. The icon of the city is without doubt the Empire State Building (even King Kong understood that!).

Then in turn: Hearst Tower, near Columbus Circle; the Flatiron Building ("flat iron"), truly singular for its shape, so much so that New Yorkers long bet on how long the building would manage to withstand the strong gusts of wind that blow where it stands; the Trump Tower is a 58-storey skyscraper located in New York at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street (the water cascade in the atrium is characteristic); the 500 Fifth Avenue is a skyscraper located on West 42nd Street in Manhattan, New York.

It's adjacent to Bryant Park, a small but very beautiful park where in winter there's an ice-skating rink and where, if you happen to wander around on sunny days as happened to me, the golden reflections take on a very characteristic light (as well as the play of skyscrapers reflected in skyscrapers); Bank of America Tower on Sixth Avenue, again facing Bryant Park, characteristic for its spire-flue similar to a unicorn's horn; the Equitable Building in Neo-Renaissance style: it occupies the entire block and rises in two blocks above the base connected to each other by a wing for its full height, forming a giant letter "H" seen from above.

The building received, in 1978, recognition as a National Historic Landmark; the Lipstick Building, also known as 53rd at Third, it goes without saying that the name is due to its shape that evokes that of a lipstick; the Bertelsmann Building in the Times Square area houses the world's largest record store, the Virgin Megastore; World Trade Center 7 is the name given to the new building constructed in place of WTC7 which collapsed during the 2001 attacks; the Citigroup Center with the peculiarity, unique in New York, of having a slanted roof; the Rockefeller Center is a group of 19 commercial buildings in New York, located in Manhattan, facing Fifth Avenue a few steps from Central Park in a southerly direction. Built by the family of American bankers Rockefeller, it's one of the largest private complexes of its kind in the world.

In December the spectacle is guaranteed with sparkling Christmas decorations, illuminated angels, the huge Christmas tree and the skating rink; the Woolworth skyscraper, with sixty floors, is one of the oldest and most famous skyscrapers in the city.....there would be others yet to name but my favourites were: the MetLife Tower and the Chrysler Building. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower (more briefly MetLife Tower) is truly unique in shape: when the skyscraper was commissioned by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, in 1907, the Campanile of St Mark's in Venice was chosen as its model; in 2002 a new computerised night-lighting system very similar to that of the Empire State Building gave this singular building an even greater charm.

The colours of the lights change in relation to particular holidays or important events and you could stand there below, open-mouthed, for hours watching it! The Chrysler Building is one of the best-known symbols of New York City: however you classify it stylistically (Art Deco or perhaps even "expressionist"), its forms are among the most elegant realised in the field of skyscraper design, so much so that in 2005 it was named the "most beautiful skyscraper in New York" by 90 of the 100 members of the American jury made up of architects, critics, engineers, art historians, lawyers, students, and it's rightly the most loved by New Yorkers.

At nightfall, the upper part of the Chrysler Building lights up, thus giving all its charm to the New York night and you never tire of photographing it! Divided into five boroughs and inhabited by more than eight million people, it has become a reference point for fashion, the economy and lifestyle: this city sets trends and appears endless and enormous and still astonishes you with its rivers of yellow taxis, so cheap (not like ours!!), the smells and the lights. I think there's no more cosmopolitan a place than this because here it's like having the whole world enclosed in a great city that resists time with the awareness of being, rightly or wrongly, the centre of the world, continuing to impose itself as a transgressive and multicultural capital, homeland of the American dream, where the dreams and fantasies of those who arrive in the promised land are born.

I was prejudiced before visiting it.... but New York must be seen once in a lifetime to touch with your own hands the contradictions of the capitalist world we live in, all in plain sight, and to understand that after 11 September the world could have seized a better chance for change. Here they're trying with Obama: how will it end?