When he faced the reality of big cities, Paolo Monti often underlined the most painful situations such as that of that solitary man who is not placed at the center of the scene but far away, on the diagonal, in a distance that has become symbolic. Ironic and thoughtful is, however, The Sunday of the Immigrants, because what could have been a classic amateur photo exercise becomes an effective synthesis of the contradictions of the world that was rising after the war: on the one hand the great internal migratory flows and on the other the signs of an industrialization that with well-being brought, as the columns of smoke show and symbolize, also damage to the environment. In this image you can see the influences not only aesthetic of the American photography of the Farm Security Administration well known to him. Curiously, on two different occasions the photograph has been titled as here in the volume edited by Giovanni Chiaramonte and "The new cathedrals, Milan" dated 1955 in the one edited by Paolo Zanzi.