In central Bologna, there’s a street with no numbers called Via Mariano Tuccella. Hundreds of people live there, but you wouldn’t be able to find it on a map. Dozens of people, who may not even know each other, all live at the same address in Turin: 1 Via della Casa Comunale, while in Rome, more than 19,000 people live on Via Modesta Valenti. But even the residents wouldn’t be able to tell you what the street looks like.

They are all examples of the “invisible” streets found in almost every major town across Italy and are mostly unknown to people without an address there. The vie fittizie, or fictitious streets, are a hand-me-down from the post-war era, when local authorities invented imaginary addresses as a way of linking the population to the land.