VI.i. Forlorn Forlì

"Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

I felt the February cold on my spine as I walked back to the bus stop outside Ridolfi airport this morning, though it was a day of raking sun that could as well have been mid-winter anywhere in Ontario. A sizeable snowstorm that had spared Bologna but struck nearly everywhere else in Italy, including Calabria and Sicily, had transformed the Romagnola countryside into something easily reminiscent of the Niagara, with fruit trees and vineyards frosted over and the long, straight spine of a mountain ridge, the Apennines in this case, rising above the plain in the distance. There was slush in the streets and I had the strange sensation, one I get every year in Toronto, that it was time to change from leather shoes to winter boots.
    As with all the other outposts of Ryanair's Low Cost empire, calling Ridolfi an airport is a bit of a stretch. It is located at the end of a suburban street in Forlì, a town on the Emilian way some eighty kilometers east of Bologna. A miniature electric bus brings people there from the city centre, coming to a halt just beyond three old mothballed trainer jets, alumni from the Italian air force, decaying by the side of the road. When I was a boy I had a passion for airplanes, and I could have named the three makes in an instant, but I no longer identify tailwings and air intakes; only brushstrokes and monograms instead. I have forgotten what used to be my calling, sure, but I still crane my neck upwards more often than most when a jet roars overhead. Recently rebuilt, the terminal proper of Ridolfi is slightly more dignified than its sad surroundings, though it could easily be mistaken for an elementary school or a supermarket, surrounded by a sea of parked cars, each waiting for its owner to return from abroad. It is little more than a glorified airfield, and like its similar cousins, it is in the middle of nowhere. Paris-Beauvais, Frankfurt-Hahn, and Copenhagen-Malmo all share with it the dubious double-barreled distinction of the low cost airport, namely that they are at least an hour's drive from their purported location, with transportation to and from often costing at least the price of the flight. Any impecunious European traveler knows the drill, packs right up to the strict fifteen kilogram limit, and grumbles at the thought of having to take another flight dominated by sojourning Brits, boisterous in a cacophony of hideously accented self-congratulatory remarks about having paid only ninety-nine pence for this flight or that.
    Looking back at the terminal and the lone tailfin protruding behind it, I trudged over to the stop, heaved a sigh, and waited for the bus. I felt as alone as I had the day I left Toronto, perhaps more, and Italy seemed as strange a land as it had ever been.
    Sarah had left. A month had gone by with her, and it had been more than two since I was last alone. I felt a strange sensation as I realized that there would be no one, not even a well-dressed Dr. Caramori, to greet me when I returned to Bologna. I lingered before going back, lost in a parting daze, sore for describing words, and angry at the parting circumstances of the world.

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    Forlì didn't have much to recommend itself. The Pinacoteca was closed because it was Monday, so I resigned myself to not seeing the little Fra Angelico that was its main recommendation. In a few of the Churches there were some works by the mediocre locals, Marco Palmezzano and Melozzo da Forlì, who even in the fifteenth century brought some civility to this place with their painting. Melozzo went on paint for Sixtus IV in Rome, famously depicting the founding of the Vatican library in what has now become a favourite cover image for renaissance history texts. For this reason alone, Melozzo is probably Forlì's most famous son, unless one is to include the not altogether willingly forgotten Mussolini, born in the hills not far from the city. Il Duce's memory is still everywhere here, from the fascist-chic wine sold at the airport duty-free to the immense Palace of Postal and Telegraphic Communications that looms over the main square. A prodigal son of the highest order, he ensured that the streets of Forlì were lined with the proud buildings of the New Roman Empire, just as he guaranteed, for the first and only time in Italy's history, that the country's railways ran on time.
    My train back to Bologna was thirty-five minutes late.