On the occasion of the re-edition, after 40 years, of another important Viaggio in Italia, namely the one edited by Luigi Ghirri that consecrated the Italian School of landscape photography, let us return to the book of the same name by Guido Piovene. This book, published in 1957 and somehow sunk into oblivion, is dedicated to the account of Piovene’s wanderings around our peninsula in various stages from 1953 to 1956.
On page 214 he writes about Bologna as you can read in the quote below, chosen to intrigue and invite you to read the whole text. Piovene’s words make us experience a puzzling comparison with the past of the rather provincial city of the 1950s. Seventy years separate us from that description, but the writer’s gaze seems closer to the Bologna of certain popular production of the Carraccis than to the city we live in today.
Pleasure-loving, easy, humorous, this is how the Bolognese see Bologna. Their political passion is truly passion, it is a vital tension, an aspect of their own love for life, related to the senses, to gluttony, to the veneration of masculinity, and finally to the hope, which arises from the very richness of blood humors, to reach the palingenesis of total redemption.
Bologna is among the most beautiful cities in Italy and Europe. There is no city that resembles it and that can replace it. It is beautiful for its energy, for the abundance of colour; and the colour that floods the city is predominantly red or reddish, the most physical, the one that most recalls the human body and blood. Florence is thin, slender. Instead Bologna, the porticoes, the arches, the domes, everything makes one think of a fleshy roundness. The dialect itself, the accent, are abundant and rounded. Certain small medieval streets in the centre bring us closer to the real life of the Middle Ages more than in other cities, where the past is archaeological. Many of Bologna's beauties, and also many of its best shops, are, I won't say secret, but rather wrapped and hidden in its prosperous folds, like the secret of the filling in a delicious dish.
Beauty in Bologna is not thought, but breathed, absorbed, made edible. [...] A strange population, and happy to be strange, gives a cordial show of manias and obstinacies. [...] There is the man always dressed as a bersagliere, who wanders under the porticoes with his chest covered in badges, perhaps fake, marches at the head of all the processions and wants to approach all the visiting ministers. There are the self-taught geniuses, often truly geniuses. The merchants, tall, fat, with black cloaks, who go into the heart of the city to sell their goods [...]
I wanted to point out, however, that Bologna is a city that makes you cheerful...
In 1981 the situation was already different, as Francesco Guccini sings:
And your Bolognese, if they exist, are they here or are they lost now
Confused and tied to thousands of different worlds
And today, what image do this city and its inhabitants give of themselves?
Sources
Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, Milano, Arnoldo Mondadori editore, 1966 (first paperback edition)
Viaggio in Italia, edited byLuigi Ghirri, Gianni Leone, Enzo Velati, Alessandria, Il Quadrante 1984 (new edition Quodlibet, 2024)
Francesco Guccini, Bologna, 1981
Image: Annibale Carracci, La bottega del macellaio, oil on canvas, 1585 circa, Christ Church Gallery, Oxford