WATER CITIES, ART CITIES The city and water in the artistic production

Water cities, been converted into "art cities", have begun competing with each other for the aesthetic renewal of their image, implementing an urban/architectural embellishment which has promoted the development of workshops, in competition with centres for humanistic and scientific studies, which have contributed to the establishing of cultural circles. coming out from the monastic space. through meditation, research, theories, ideas, projects, schools, with mathematicians and philosophers, literati and poets, historians and archaeologists playing a leading role together with the masters operating in the diverse art world. Our present perspective is not addressed to highlight people contributing to "the beautiful" of the "sea city", as planners, philosophers, entrepreneurs or politicians, but people able to appreciate aesthetic and landscape values, as artists, stressing lyrical and dramatic aspects, negative and positive characteristics, vitality and solitude, looking for a sensory charm, far from a mere report. The artistic literature about the "water city" has got very ancient roots. It comes from the myth more than from history; it sublimes images by freeing them from spatialtemporal constraints which limit universality. The work of art, even when it lingers over the story, does not catch only its formal component, as a surface description of landscape circumstances, but it goes into its connotative features thoroughly, interprets its more hidden meanings and proposes them to people willing to join in the investigation, going beyond the visualized representation, in order to penetrate its hidden soul, together with the artist.