Book of Cities - Hardcover

Piero Ventura is the author and illustrator of more than eighty books, including The Magic Well and The Painter’s Trick. He lives in Italy.

From the Author’s Desktop

I’ve always wished I could fly, ever since I was little. Not by sitting in an airplane, but by flapping my arms like birds flap their wings. I was fascinated by the idea of seeing the world from above–houses, people, cities, the countryside, the sea. Everything must be more beautiful from up there! Of course, I never quite succeeded. So then I tried to imagine what it would be like, and to tell about it through drawing. Obviously, from way up high everything looks tinier and more curious, but you can see and understand a lot of things you can’t from down on the ground. So, year after year, book after book, more and more young readers all around the world came to call me “the little-people guy.”
Over thirty years have now passed since I drew Book of Cities. Cities, and children, have changed a lot since then–and naturally I have, too; to see any one of the many “little people” in this book, I now have to put on my glasses! But I’m sure that there are still many little boys and girls all around the globe who want to fly–in order to see and understand a world that is increasingly complicated, yet ever more fascinating.

~Piero Ventura