There are cultural myths that allow us to reflect on modernity starting from its roots, allowing us to investigate its fundamental developments and polarities: among them, the myth of transparency that, born in the field of architecture with the construction of the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, It no longer refers only to the creation of spaces characterized by a total reversibility of interior and exterior, but has become a key concept in the political and social debate throughout the West. With an agile, theoretically solid style and a language that combines rigor and fluidity, Riccado Donati here faces the evolutionary stages of this phenomenon, following its progressive transformation from dream to nightmare through the study of those disciplines that have always had the task of forging and disseminating myths: literature and the visual arts. From Thackeray to Dumas, from Dostoevsky to Ruskin, passing through the modernist 20th century in Tzara, Breton, Scheerbart, Benjamin, Joyce, Palazzeschi, Bontempelli, Duchamp, Eisenstein, Zamyatin, to the postwar period and contemporary authors (among others, Nabokov, Calvino, Rodari, Ballard, Romero), this essay shows how, constantly moving between the territories of imaginary and concrete construction practices, outside and inside the perimeter of history (really lived or only hypothetical), intellectuals and artists from all over the world world have attributed opposite values ​​to diaphanous constructions. Alternatively, glass palaces, glass houses, commercial storefronts and transparent display cases have served to transmit libertarian utopias and concentration camp nightmares, predictions of a bright egalitarian horizon and dark scenarios of generalized homologation, finally arriving, in recent years, at true apocalyptic visions. about the destiny of the community.