“Smart city”: indicates the updated profile of a city conceived and organized according to the canons of structures and canons dictated by the most advanced and innovative devices of today’s technology. Services and infrastructures, spaces and times of city life are governed and managed by the efficiency of an artificially conceived intelligence. Will therefore be called "intelligent a city that enjoys the most technologically advanced facilities that those who live there will be able to use. It is not difficult to infer from this the inevitable fallout on the very conception that one obtains in understanding the proper meaning of the quality of life of men called to benefit from it, also in an economic sense. But the crises periodically grip the economic systems, the emergencies linked to the growth of migratory flows, the challenges deriving from ecological and health issues, increasingly force us to revise this paradigm of "intelligence" and "quality of life" in order to anthropologically redevelop the very meaning of the word - and of the related value - "city". The late antique debate on the subject (v. De civitate Dei: the fall of Rome in the fifth century a. C), as well as the attempts to reformulate it throughout the history of philosophy (v. “Metamorfosi della città di Dio”) could constitute a source of contributions for a non-retrological reflection, for a work of thought open to the challenges and questions arising from current economic experience. Does the city - and the life it lives by - still need men? What's more: does reason as a "man's" faculty still have sense and the right of citizenship in it? And finally: for these (men) what meanings can the expression "intelligent city" have?...Good work!