Milan is in constant transformation: it draws new towers, opens cultural centers, ggrafts, demolishes, redevelops, and mirrors the sky in its ever-changing skyline. It is a city capable of reinventing itself through the language of finance and contemporary architecture, often captured in its contradictory nature by cinema and television series, which multiply on screen its reflective glass surfaces and the raw concrete of its suburbs. From the towers of CityLife in Succession, a symbol of global economic power, to the urban frames of Monterossi, Fedeltà, 3/19, and Blocco 181, the screen amplifies the geometries and tensions of a metropolis that never ceases to redefine itself. 

But while Milan tends to imagine itself upwards, the new Rai Fiction–Fidelio series Hype, directed by Fabio Mollo and Domenico Croce and premiered in Rome at the “Alice nella Città” section, chooses instead to look downwards—into the postwar modernist geometries of the residential neighborhood QT8 (Triennial Eighth Neighborhood). 

Set at the foot of Monte Stella, in an urban space born in the 1940s with the pragmatic aim of housing those displaced by the war, the series builds its visual universe in the horizontal heart of Milan—less dazzling, more porous, punctuated by neighborhood cafés and the architecture of an industrial periphery.

Anna, Luca, and Marco are three young people who dream of making their mark through rap music, shaking off the constraints and dynamics of the neighborhood where they grew up and from which they seek to break free. Their story brings the periphery back to the foreground as an identity landscape — a counterpoint to the dominant, emblematic image of a vertical metropolis: Hype views the character of this urban heritage as a living, autonomous organism that bursts into the protagonists’ lives and shapes their desires.

The music video by Ernia — a Milan-born rapper and songwriter — set in the QT8 district of Milan

“To tell this voice, we had to become transparent—almost dematerialized. To blend in with everything surrounding it,” say the directors. “QT8, the urban arena in which the series is set, is in fact a protagonist in its own right. In addition to having the voice of Ernia, the artist who best represents it, QT8 acts upon every character in an indelible way. It’s a living image, present even when blurred in a close-up or left off-screen. It’s always there, shaping everything that happens in the next scene.”