Franklin Toker, professor of art and architecture history at the University of Pittsburgh, has been looking closely at Pittsburgh since his second day here in 1973.

He was immediately struck by the city's "magnificence," which is saying something because he'd just spent six years in Florence, Italy, leading an excavation under the fabled duomo. Unable to find a book addressing the Pittsburgh he saw then, he began thinking of writing one.

"Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait" was published in 1986, just a year after Pittsburgh received Places Rated Almanac's most livable city accolade. The book was well-received but failed to gain the national audience Toker had hoped for, despite his appearance on the "Today" TV show.

Fast-forward 20 years and a second "most livable" citation and there's an updated version of the book, "Pittsburgh: A New Portrait" (University of Pittsburgh Press, $34.95), written at the behest of his publisher, to be released next month.

Toker, who lives in Squirrel Hill ("with all the professors") and often rides his bike to work, says cycling is an efficient way to explore the various nooks and crannies of the neighborhoods at the core of the book. He also employed a technique he uses in a course he teaches on Pittsburgh, that of tracing a particular street or other segment of the city back through time, unveiling layer upon layer of history and meaning.

"Pittsburgh: A New Portrait" is a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and in some cases building-by-building, analysis of the city, an architectural and social history that reads as both love letter and critique. Toker has broken the city into eight sections, each getting a chapter filled with (mostly) color photographs, maps and drawings.

An incredibly agile writer, Toker moves easily from biography to aesthetics to history, all the while peppering the text with clever turns of phrase that lead to plenty of chuckles and even a few laugh-out-loud moments.

"I'm a professor, so I talk a lot," he warns at the start of a phone conversation in which he displays that same wit and breadth of knowledge.

Q: What was it like revisiting your 1986 book?

A: It was fantastic. There were finds all over town.

The city has had a lot of losses and it's had a terrific number of gains, and people in Pittsburgh, never mind around the country, have really no sense of the superb things that have gone up here. The general -- though certainly not in every corner -- upgrading of life in Pittsburgh is very, very remarkable.

Q: Who were you writing for?

A: I keep saying that guy in San Diego [laughs]. Do I even know anyone in San Diego? Hmm, not closely.

I am motivated to get Pittsburgh out on the national scene. In that sense it's for out-of-towners, first of all, and barely much behind it is to get Pittsburghers to know each other.

I should say at the absolute beginning, this was going to be a history of how we got to where we are; here and there in a synoptic way, that is still there.

Q: How would you describe the book?

A: The hero of the book is the Pittsburgh neighborhood. I really think that is what keeps the city afloat, it keeps the city interesting, that allows for people really to express themselves in all kinds of ways.

There are two parts of the city everybody sees themselves as having in common. But I have two right away, maybe there are two newcomers to that. The classic thing was the Golden Triangle, that belongs to everybody, even if it has the stamp of corporations on it.

The second neighborhood that people had in common was Oakland. The money was made in the valleys, it was sort of gathered together Downtown in the banks, and it was spent in Oakland in gigantic ways. Part of the deal was really Oakland was going to Americanize you.

But the two that have been up-and-coming would absolutely be the North Side and the South Side. The North Side, which has practically now just in the last 25 years become a significant rival to Oakland. It has now two huge sports arenas. It has The Warhol [Museum], the Carnegie Science Center, the Mattress Factory and Children's Museum; that's four absolutely stunning museums. The Aviary, which was somebody's stepchild for years and years and years, has really blossomed.

The fourth one would be the South Side. I think a lot of people have an attachment to the South Side even if their father was not Polish and their grandfather did not work in one of the mills.

Q: Do you have a favorite place in the city or a favorite part?

A: Flagstaff Hill. You come across the bridge and here's this great, it's not exactly a rolling hill, it's actually kind of an upturned bowl of a hill, crowned by magnificent trees at the top. I must have felt that way maybe for 15 years till it hit me, 'Hey, this is all artificial.' This thing was a cabbage patch, it was flat, flat, flat. One of the heroes of my book is Edward Manning Bigelow, who simply transported millions of cubic feet of dirt and piled it up, and the whole thing is a kind of a visual setup .... It's all artificial, but really stunningly done.

Q: And the favorite neighborhood?

A: A favorite place is one that I definitely discovered in its essence [during] the summers of '06, '07 and '08 -- three summers that I did all my foot research -- Highland Park. It flourishes where it's not supposed to. It totally is not self-sustaining, a couple of mom-and-pop grocery stores. There's no real grocery store. There's really no infrastructure to it, and therefore, by rights it really, it would not flourish.

Q: Your previous book, the bestselling "Fallingwater Rising," is being made into a feature film?

A: Yeah, it's going to happen, if we could only get that $100 million together. It's going to happen, but what I can do is practically nothing. It's been optioned and I'm being paid every year for those rights and the script is finished.

I'm not your great candidate for popular culture, so the lead Hollywood producer -- there are three -- e-mailed me that Sir Ian McKellen is dying to play Frank Lloyd Wright. I had to Google Sir Ian McKellen. Actually, you can remind me: Was he in "Harry Potter" or was he in "Lord of the Rings"?

Q: What else are you working on?

A: Well, the huge thing -- and please don't call it my magnum opus, because I've gotta live way after that -- each November [for the next four years], a new volume is coming out of my excavations under the cathedral of Florence. We hope to have the first copy of [volume one] by Oct. 2, when a whole bunch of American medieval art historian specialists are coming to town.

[That book in Toker's "Florence Duomo Project" is "On Holy Ground: Liturgy, Architecture and Urbanism in the Cathedral and the Streets of Medieval Florence." The other volumes address the cathedral's archaeology, art history and history.]

I do have other books on Pittsburgh in mind, also because the people who came out of here were so over-scaled, they were giants. It's a very, very small pond with some unbelievably outsized frogs in it.

Q: Any parting thoughts?

A: The city has survived, it will survive, it's time we let our hair down.

The city really has re-created itself in a large sense, and I really have a sense that the transition is over. We are living in the Pittsburgh of the future. It's going to be kind of more of the same.