Bologna Blues. Under the arcades with Enrico Brizzi

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"You don't want to contradict the song that says not even a child gets lost in the center of Bologna." Enrico Brizzi is giving me directions on the phone and I have to admit that I got lost under the arcades. I'm in Bologna because after reading Due, the long-awaited sequel by Jack Frusciante Has Left the Group, I felt like doing a bit of tourism in my youth and also asking the author if the city is still Learned, Fat, Red and Towered. While we're at it, it would also be a good idea to understand how it has changed since that summer of one nine nine two when old Alex, the protagonist of the two novels, trotted like Girardengo up Saragozza Avenue. Finally I find the place and there is a moment of mirroring: we both look like we've come out of Peaky Blinders. We dive into Via Indipendenza where some couple is doing the ritual laps. "When I was a kid, you wouldn't even think of walking around Bologna. To go to the center we set off on bikes or Vespas. If you look at the photos, there were cars parked in Piazza Maggiore,” Brizzi tells me, as soon as we find a table outside. The owner is worried about a patrol car passing by and doesn’t want to get fined for the obscure regulation on outdoor seating. “Up until ten years ago, all this tourism was unimaginable. Today, the city has become very bourgeois, or gentrified, to use a word that disgusts me.” The impression is that it has really changed skin: from an epicenter of youth culture thanks to the university to a showcase city in the grand tour of tortellino. A giant open-air Airbnb. “What has changed is that people my age have inherited their aunt’s apartment, like these late-nineteenth-century houses on Via Indipendenza, and today they live off the proceeds. They’ve actually stopped working.”

I think you have to have wealthy relatives to deserve this fortune. “I don’t say this out of envy. It was at the classical school, the Caimani of my books, the city’s elite school, that I found myself among the Serbelloni Mazzanti Vien dal Mare. Mine is a large family: my father had eight brothers, my mother seven, and the grandparents were certainly not Trump. They were a surveyor from the province and the director of the post office in San Lazzaro di Savena.” The grandparents will often return to this chat, but in the meantime I ask them how to recognize a true Bolognese. Are seven generations enough like for the Romans? “Let me make my credentials clear: a Bolognese family since at least 1613. My ancestor Guidus de Briziis, sword in hand, worked for the municipality of Bologna as a mountain captain. He was in the Apennines to stop the Tuscan invasions and quell the unruly noblemen, who were counts during the day and wore the mask of bandits at night to commit robberies”. By instinct, it takes more than seven generations, then. He tells me that it is all the result of the research of his father, a professor of Modern History specialized in student mobility. “My parents' generation was ashamed to express themselves in dialect, but my grandparents spoke it. And it may be a backward thing, but when I realize that my daughters don't understand a word, it becomes a mission to write it”. But, question of questions, is the Bolognese dialect still spoken in Bologna? “You can hear it at the stadium, even though tourists have arrived there too, especially with the Champions League. It is a language that is disappearing”.

Brizzi is in the shadow of the Two Towers for the match. He has a season ticket and has just written a song for the Bologna team called Zirudela del Bologna. This is one of the threads that ties him to his hometown since he moved to Como. The other is the language he feels the need to return to. “At Porta Maggiore there is a plaque that recalls Dante's intuition in De Vulgari Eloquentia, when he realized that two different dialects are spoken in Bologna: in the knights' area the language was more similar to Lombard because of the Germanic root; in the popular area, with porticoes that you almost hit your head against because they are so low, the Latin root was much more evident. I also had this double dialect at home: my grandparents corrected each other”. I suspect that a question about grandparents is in order at this point. “I am part of a generation that was told that grandparents must be understood. My father was still in the cradle when a hand grenade flew into his room. It was the Republicans who wanted to make my grandfather pay for having crossed over to the other side. That same grandfather told me about when he found himself waiting at the partisan command next to a bucket full of gouged out eyes. In that chaos, pity had died, but in any case things were better in the city. They had had to sell the land that had always been theirs to take refuge in Bologna. The violence in the streets and private, on both sides, are at home here. I grew up knowing that behind it there was a history of blood”.

Bologna, a city without mercy, one might say with Luca Carboni. Maybe it's because of its geopolitical location as a hinge, but everyone has passed through here, from the Etruscans to the punk rockers. "It's an open city. The sun rises from the sea side and sets towards San Luca. There's a psychogeographic aspect: we are the only region that takes its name from a street. It means that we are street people, ontologically on a journey. On one side there are the Apennines, on the other the Bassa, the Badlands, people accustomed to thinking in terms of ares and tornature. And then on the axis of the Via Emilia there is the megalopolis that Tondelli talks about, so that from Parma to Rimini it is rare for the inhabited area to be interrupted. Bologna has always been politically one with Romagna". Ouch, I've heard of people attacked for much less. "Eh, if you want to piss off a Bolognese just tell him he is from Romagna, or provincial" . Exactly, I read that today about a million people gravitate around Bologna. Not a metropolis but not a small town either. “It has always felt big, but in 1200 it was practically New York. Just look at the city walls, one of the largest in Europe, and it was so well defended that it took the son of Frederick II prisoner and never gave him back”. A city that was once Guelph and then the capital of Catholic-Communism with ragù sauce, or am I wrong? “Many of us are children of mothers who went to church and fathers who were involved in left-wing politics. I went to distribute flyers for Proletarian Democracy and then went straight to the Catholic scouts. It wasn’t seen as a contradiction. The people who, in my memory, have gathered the most consensus in these parts are Romano Prodi and Archbishop Zuppi”. Look, in the end Bologna is the cradle of the historic compromise, the ecumenical embrace between the two churches, the Communist and the Catholic. “Just look at who the students of ’77 were picking on. They paraded staging the wedding between Berlinguer and Andreotti, they called the first an idiot and the other an executioner. The strong powers here have always been the Church, the Party, the University and the entrepreneurship that revolves around the Fair”.

Brizzi becomes a case when at twenty he publishes Jack Frusciante è uscita dal gruppo, a book that marked a generation. Who knows what it was like to be a young writer in the city of young people at the end of the millennium. Getting drunk live on Telemontecarlo at Uncle Rispoli's, making a couple of appearances on Maurizio Costanzo sciò, Michele Serra who renames you Giovane Holding, Vasco who interviews you in your local pub. A reckless life. "Being twenty in Bologna is like living in Disneyland, but it's one thing to be born there, another to come from outside. Those who arrive have always had to shell out a lot of money. Then there are those who understand the sacrifice and get down to taking exams, but also a whole bunch of idiots in their eighteenth year behind schedule at Dams. When I happened to get off the train I saw these sons of the Lancia Alfa Romeo dealer in Avellino who would get on with a cannibalistic nose bone, go to the bathroom and come out ready for Christmas lunch with their relatives. A lot of out-of-towners complain about not having met even one person from Bologna, and it's true that they are two distinct communities. Music, however, has always been transversal: we went to the same clubs and the same concerts”.

Oh, let's get to the students who complain about the high prices for trains and transport, about rent increases. "The exploitation of students is one of the city's traditional businesses. Already in the 16th century, students demonstrated against the high cost of living in Bologna, but they knew they were in a center of excellence. I mean, in Via Galliera there was Copernicus' house. At a certain point the rector allowed students to carry swords to defend themselves in fights, after one of them had been killed by a Bolognese." The problems change while always remaining the same, including vested interests. "There's no doubt that Bologna is a bourgeois city. You don't find large working-class neighborhoods because the Emilian industry is small and widespread. There are no Agnellis around here. The places of the underclass and marginalization when I was a child were the Barca and the Pilastro, where there were Calabrians, Sicilians, connections to the underworld, a sort of Fifty-sixth Street. The PCI worked to reclaim those places. The Arci, the free radio, opened up there . Today you can go there without any problems, back then if you went there on a bike you came back without one”. It is difficult to reconcile the left-wing stronghold that moves at 30 km per hour with the sixth place among the most dangerous cities in Italy. “It is the ambivalence between the good-natured image and the hidden violence, which comes to the surface with the Bolognese crime writers in the 90s. In those novels as in real life there were Naziskins, gangsters stuffed with coke who made bets at the racetrack like “Do you want to see that for ten million I will do it in reverse all the way to Florence?” If you read The Balla dalle scarpe di ferro by Loriano Macchiavelli you discover that the first trial for criminal association in the newborn Italian State was held in Bologna. I grew up near the stadium, a lower middle class area, but on Sundays you could see the clashes from the terrace. It’s a city that is unlike any other place I know.” Quite different from where you moved, to that branch of Lake Como, right? “There at midnight you’re either in bed or they send you there. For goodness sake, I have a kayak and a bike, the paths behind the house. At fifty it’s a wonderful place, if I were twenty I would have shot myself.”

Speaking of leaving, in Due Alex and his friends set off on an interrail. Now that the station looks like the Moria mine, is Bologna still the launch pad for exploring the world? “Interrail is making a comeback. Two of my daughters have done it. Beyond the fact that Bologna is a convenient place to reach other places, for me it is also a family story. In my house the men worked abroad. My uncle Ulisse was a purser on transatlantic ships and returned every six months bringing with him stories that were half exotic and half mythomaniac. He told of a stopover in Saigon in '72 in which instead of rushing into a brothel with the others he decided to go and see the Vietnam War. Only then he couldn't come back and they had to transport him in a pirogue on the Mekong. Another uncle was a civil engineer in French Africa and the house was full of indigenous weapons and big game trophies”. It may be the plains but it makes you think that it is easy to get over the hills and go elsewhere. “ My initiatory journey, when I was in high school, was walking to the sea with a friend of mine. I had brought along an axe that weighed a lot. It takes an hour or an hour and a half to get to Rimini, depending on the traffic, but it can turn into a six-day adventure.”

We move to a trattoria. We order the appetizer and two gramigne with sausage. A piece in the New York Times comes to mind that talks about mortadella nightmare. It says that even a reservation has become impossible. “I grew up in a restaurant, with my aunt who cooked. In this land, matriarchy reigns, she ran the place together with her mother and aunt. And a plate of tagliatelle always came out”. But in this gourmet mutation, do the dives that serve you pasta without risotto still exist? “The neighborhood trattoria has almost disappeared. On the other hand, there are plenty of old Bolognese taverns from 1800 that actually opened the day before yesterday. Maybe they were pizzerias before. There is a sclerosis of people who trust Tripadvisor and Instagram: they all want to go to the same place, take the same photos, eat the same dishes. The real difference in the relationship with food, however, is more at home. Once upon a time there was a fixed pot on the stove, today even families have changed. And I'll tell you that writing while you know there's a broth simmering is a whole other thing." He shows me the results, of which he is legitimately proud, of the menu for the futurist-themed party of the Psychoathletes, the association of walkers he has been a member of for twenty years. They are absurd dishes, which must be cooked blindfolded, taken from a recipe book from '31: lunar blue jellies called candied electric emotions, a savory pie in the shape of a rotating sun... As we head towards the stadium, the conversation shifts to football. He tells me about the well-wishing phone calls before every game to the home of the late midfielder Klas Ingesson, who had the unfortunate idea of ​​putting his number on the roster. The current player he is most fond of? "Also because of the British mentality, I'll say Ferguson. He tore the ligaments in his knee and continued to play with his teammates who called for a substitution." As we walk at the brisk pace of going to a game, we read a headline in the Resto del Carlino that talks about clashes in Via del Pratello. Brizzi tells me: “For me it’s like saying clashes in the hallway at home. It’s the street of taverns and bars, where I have a lot of friends”. We pass some freshly inked graffiti for Ramy and Gaza. Bologna is also a city that doesn’t give discounts. Even Cesare Cremonini, who today is considered a singer-songwriter, was mocked when he was the voice of Lùnapop. “I was at MTV Day, in 2000. They made him a banner that said Lunapippe”. Has it happened to you too? “Of course. Thirty years ago, people who today may have inherited a pharmacy wrote on the walls of the center Jack Frusciante has entered the business”. The only thing that cannot be forgiven, as we know, is success.

I ask him if the distance, a more sporadic frequentation and, why not, even this chat have made him want to write a book about Bologna, his city. “It’s the project of a lifetime,” he replies. Publishers and readers, you have been warned. We say goodbye, I head a bit haphazardly toward the Roxy Bar that really exists, not just in the song. I don’t meet any stars, but on the other hand Giorgio, a bookseller friend, joins me. Thanks to a few drinks, to get to the station I still need Google Maps. I hope Dalla and Brizzi will forgive me.

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