Angeli, diavoli e tram

'Black in the black night, slowly passes through the sleeping city the sad convoy with its taciturn, resigned occupants: it is midnight, those who watch pray, it is the hour of the Mona Lisa'.

It all happens on All Saints’ Day. The Angel and the Devil meet at the Famedio in Milan's Monumental Cemetery for a game of dice. The winner will be able to take his souls for a ride on the black tram, the lugubrious convoy ironically renamed ‘la Gioconda’ that until 1925 carried the dead through the city.

Luca Crovi, author, and Federico Maggioni, illustrator, give us an extraordinary and unprecedented Milan, always halfway between reality and fantasy, tradition and legend; and at every throw of the dice they tell us a story: the secrets of the Cà di Ringhiera, the legend of Sant'Eustorgio and the relics of the Magi, the story of the four Madonnas or the obscure Bagnera squeeze.

Federico Maggioni's illustrations and Luca Crovi's texts give life to two stories that run almost in parallel, one made of words and the other of images, in this book that is a tribute to the city of Milan, its streets, palaces and the personalities who lived there.