The spirit of modern utopia was to state the primacy of planning on the reparation, conservation, and reformation of reality and the view that we should destroy what already exists and start again from the beginning in order to build something rational and good. In this paper Maria Moneti sketches out some aspect of the history of utopian thought from the modern rationalism to its decline in the contemporary age. The ‘bankruptcy’ of utopia as philosophical and literary genre has swept (...) away also the need to imagine the ‘ideal city’. At the end of this path, a first balance seems to suggest a post-modern utopia which nourishes more modest ambitions than its modern version and aims at keeping and respecting the world where we live. (shrink)