Milan, Italy

In how many ways can you see, imagine, and portray a city?

In Milan, well-dressed men straight out of a Fernando Di Leo movies sip on liquor in bottomless cups at grim strip clubs, the riotous Chinese never leave the endless rows of shops along Paolo Sarpi, the street kids regulate street issues, spilling blood on the porch of the McDonald's in Ticinese and the fashionistas tip-tap between puddles as they scream into their cellphones, gesticulating wildly for a taxi that never seems to come. The cheerlessness of happy hours next to the toxic canals in Navigli and the gravitas embodied by the statues of nineteenth century bankers, peeping out of palazzo halls along C.so Italia.

Luigi Serafini reflects in his own peculiar way the peculiar, hybrid character of the city he calls home. He's a graphic designer, a costume designer, a scenographer, a writer, an artist, or really none of the above, and only truly a visionary (or perhaps only a hack depending on your point of view). After the Codex Seraphinianus was published in 1981, key figures in the Italian and international arts like Fellini and Calvino – but also, later, Tim Burton – dug it. The code is a fictional encyclopedia with more than a thousand, crazy drawings of pseudo-scientific, pataphysical, freaky figures and diagrams, captioned with incomprehensible writings. Half-man, half-object figures making the most usual gestures in the most unusual – and at times creepy – ways.

Serafini was born in Rome, but he's been working for theaters a lot in Milan, and where he recently got a big show at PAC last year. Milan itself could have been on one of the Codex pages.