This book can be used as a guide: D. Bavilsky described in detail the sights of thirty-five Italian cities that he visited in the fall of 2017. However, in all other respects, it is as if he deliberately arranged the text in such a deliberately experimental way as to sit by all genre chairs. “The Desire to Be a City” is a diary of a specific trip and at the same time a story about works of art that the author has not seen. Thus, the document turns into a work of art with elements of fiction, into a documentary novel and auto-fiction, when famous paintings and frescoes from the history of visuality are a frame and a reason to talk about the urgent. For example, about melancholy and the feeling of insufficiency of modern man, about the “digital” perception of the 21st century and about the “fate of Russia.” Bavilsky’s main goal is to pull the reader out of everyday life, to move him, using the “effect of presence,” into a space of high culture, accessible, despite its ideality, to anyone, even when entire countries are closing their borders and museum doors. Dmitry Bavilsky is a famous blogger and writer.