The trips to the Middle East hit Lucchini. In addition to endless skyscrapers led him to try to decipher those female lives and faces hidden under the veils for tradition or for constraint. Digital works were born in these occasions as testimony of distant worlds and of an (in)possible dialogue between cultures. The critic and historian of pop-art Alan Jones wrote in 2011 on the occasion of the exhibition of paintings that reflected on burqa and abaya in Venice for the Biennale of Art of that year: “Flavio Lucchini is carrying out his job of provocation by forcing us to face the contradiction between ways of life which not long ago appeared irreconcilable. The months ahead shall reveal what is behind the covered gaze. It is worth recalling that, in Japan, it is not the face that is covered with a veil, but the mirror.” Ten years later those works and those words, in front of the images that come to us from Afghanistan, are still of disturbing relevance.