The volume presents the complete transcription of the lectures given by Luigi Ghirri at the Università del Progetto in Reggio Emilia between 1989 and 1990. The lecture texts are accompanied by the visual materials used in the classroom, including works by Ghirri and references drawn from the history of photography and art. As Geoff Dyer writes, Ghirri's work has an almost universal effect on anyone who encounters it: an initial enthusiasm for his images deepens, with more exposure, into a lasting conversion. Gianni Celati recalls that for Ghirri every kind of photograph was part of a single alphabet, running from Walker Evans and Eugène Atget to André Kertész and the circle around Nadar, to innovators such as Moholy-Nagy and Muybridge; in Reggio Emilia he did not teach photography as an art separate from everything else, but as belonging to an alphabet connecting different habits of seeing, in which one recognises an inhabitable world.