" I love this city. I'm an architect, not a 'concrete developer.' And I have faith in the work of the judiciary." So Stefano Boeri , star architect and president of the Triennale , involved in the urban planning investigation that is shaking the City of Milan , broke his silence on social media.

In a lengthy post, Boeri explains that he was the target of a " violent defamatory campaign, particularly due to the dissemination of a series of decontextualized fragments of my private messages , which were forwarded to the media before reaching my lawyers and myself. A regrettable situation, not new in Italy."

A situation that "in the wake of a media trial, turns those who, like in my case, are simply involved in a preliminary investigation, into the guilty."

The father of the Vertical Forest, the architect behind the new Via Roma project in Cagliari , recently explained that he decided to intervene because "I realized that my silence had left room for too many doubts and malicious interpretations. In many media outlets, fragments of my messages were published and 'assembled' together in a specious manner, without any reference to the context in which they were formulated, thus suggesting a totally distorted image of my professional and personal life."

The warning he had given Mayor Sala? "It wasn't a threat, but rather a serious alarm over the actions of the City's Landscape Commission, which continued to reject our 'Torre Botanica' project, citing reasons that had nothing to do with the Commission's assigned responsibilities. I would add that our project for Via Pirelli 39, after a year of meetings and heated discussions, was approved by the Commission only after the painful abandonment of the original 'Torre Botanica' idea (an experimental and advanced work of architecture I held dear and which I believed would have brought Milan significant international recognition) and the submission of a substantially different project."

Boeri, the city's former culture councilor, also wrote that Italy "does not need to demolish the Milanese model of governing urban complexity." He acknowledged that "certainly today we need a more incisive policy of redistributing the wealth that Milan attracts and too often concentrates in restricted and exclusive spaces and environments." But, "unless there is a proper investigation into any illegalities, ."