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The density of the city has a centripetal force that pulls you in. Be it bumping into Naples on a charter flight, buffeted cruelly by turbulence, or in the train from Rome describing the long final arc around the suburbs of the city, with the chimneys of Montedison chemical works burning like satanic candles against the hazy profile of Vesuvius…But best of all the arrival in Naples by boat at dusk, from Capri or Ischia, seeing first a simple grey band of land which, as we approach, unravels into subtler striations: foreground, middleground , distant hills. The texture of these bands becomes more granulated, resolving itself into discernible buildings, the evocatively underlit glass dome of the Galleria rising like a moon above the crenellations of the Castel Nuovo. And as we inch into the port the colour and clangour of the whole preposterous city breaks through and possesses us.

Flying down to Rio: One of the airports in Rio de Janeiro (Santos Dumont) is very close to the centre, closest really to the image, beloved of city planners in the 20s and 30s, (the unplayful Le Corbusier no exception to the trend): an urban sky dotted with planes, settling with the utmost lightness on the roofs of baroque skyscrapers. A beautiful image albeit technologically unfeasible But to fly in to the Dumont airstrip gives one actually the feeling very much of the 30s image of the air travel, so close it is to the centre. Let us come in on one of those silver planes, whose propellers whirred until 1993; let's Fly Down to Rio: Our plane banks over Ipanema and Copacabana, glittering modern condominiums, hotels like ramparts flanking miles of dazzling beach alive with the pulullation of tiny bodies (for Cariocas do not loll on the beach with a book)

There is something powerfully apocalyptic about the view, as if half the population of the great city had swarmed from its rat-holes and crevices summoned en masse to the foot of the Atlantic crashing in onto the sands, as if awaiting, alert some Spielbergian visitation. Several times I have come into a city in this route and I have sometimes felt almost physically sick at the beauty of it, and not just the beauty; I am moved to tears just at the thought of humanity, massed humanity at the ocean's edge.

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