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"How does a stranger build an image of a city which is new to him?" 1After having explored the meaning that the image of the city may take for its inhabitants, Kevin Lynch suggests some directions for future research, among them the study of urban landscape representation by foreign people. This paper presents an empirical research on mapping Milan through a sample of hundred migrants, interviewed during the first period of their stay in town. The study puts forward the possibility of creating a cartography which is different and more  complex than technical ones, and which is capable to reveal the 'invisible landscapes' inhabited by migrants. The survey starts from the idea suggested by Lynch in The image of the city to enquire into a subject which today appears as an emerging issue of the contemporary city, increasingly inhabited by transitory populations: the relationship between urban landscape and its new inhabitants. In particular, the survey suggests a re-reading of  the  elements (paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks) introduced by Lynch to define mental representation' contents, while tuning them to the migrant's specific condition in today's city: a condition where the perception of the place aims at finding a direction in the urban landscape, rather than examining the urban layout legibility. From the mental maps drawn on the basis of these elements, variable geographies arise where the urban objects that first relate to migrants are revealed, as well as those that better lend themselvesto the creation of an image of the city for people who are trying to get their bearings. While taking the representation of urban landscape  by migrants as a gesture of self-organization within that landscape, this research reveals the 'structural' and creative role of the look of the inhabitants directly involved in the project of a multicultural town. Imaging and representing urban geography is actually an attempt at inhabiting the city 'mentally': this gesture makes explicit the act of taking to oneself a space which, no longer pertaining to an estranging experience, changes into a space open to unpredictable inhabiting conditions.