Abstract
As an answer to the authors who have participated in the drafting of this volume, an atlas of eight major Mediterranean cities has been developed. The purpose of this work is to ground breaking illustrations of metropolitan areas. These are intended to resonate with the writers’ words, descriptions and personal experiences. In the absence of any available vector maps, different sets of satellite images were selected and processed. For each metropolis, we defined three mapping scales: old town, historic city, current urban area. Photo-interpretation spontaneously tallies with the experimental approach adopted by novelists and essayists. Cities escape streamlined frameworks, they spread beyond the frontiers that others have designed for them, and their complexity makes most usual words obsolete. Through the landscapes they depict and decrypt, and beyond standard clichés, imagery and literary papers use their cunning abilities to team up and produce new portraits of the city.