VI.iii. On the Trading Floor

"By 1948, the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success."
- Gore Vidal

In Piazza Nettuno, the Communists were out. They were protesting the relatively recent opening of the Sala Borsa, an enormous new public library that has been created out of the disused central stock exchange, itself within the walls of an austere fifteenth century castle. The Sala Borsa is the new nerve centre of Bologna, or at least it feels that way, being one of the most successful redevelopment projects in recent Italian memory. The old trading hall has been exquisitely restored, its airy, three storey atrium fitted with a glass floor that allows the remains of the Roman city to be viewed underfoot, while above an extremely trendy café and wine bar attract a mix of Italo-hipsters and elegant fur-lined intelligentsia types who come to people watch. Exhibits compiled by the European Union's public relations sector jostle for space with curious residents. In the frescoed sitting rooms, rows of study desks and computers are lit by Tizio lamps, and the public reads, listens to music, or watches movies in square leather chairs, while in the entranceway flat screen monitors broadcast the latest news from around the world in a plethora of different languages. It is certainly the finest, classiest, most impressive modern public space I have ever seen anywhere.
    So why, on this Friday morning, is there a small red tent with hammer and sickle flags waving about positioned in front of the Sala Borsa's main entrance? Certainly, this is the most visible place in town, for unlike Piazza Verdi it is within the commercial as opposed to academic heart of the city, and unlike the contiguous Piazza Maggiore, it is smaller in scale and more open to direct confrontation. More of a stage than a stadium or crossroads, it is perpetually occupied. Here Bologna's martyrs, old and new, are commemorated. Large glass plaques and floral wreaths remind the flanêur of the darker points in Bologna's history: the battle against Austrian domination, the Nazi massacres, the Red Brigade bombings of 1980. But the communist party was up in arms against something entirely different; the inclusion of a private bookstore in the Sala Borsa complex. Indeed, the whole complex had only been made possible through a number of public-private partnerships. Indeed, it did seem rather absurd that the best places in the development were reserved for saleable books, many of which were not even in the public library's own collection. The communists, for their part, were offering free books to the general public as a publicity stunt. Curious, I went to see what they had to offer, expecting Marx and Engel but instead finding a regular crop of airport fiction and harlequin romances. Next to me a shouting match started between two elderly men, not regarding ideology but instead who was the rightful owner of one of John Grisham's newly translated novels. I quietly walked away.
    The atmosphere today was perhaps unusually tense. In Genoa, the trial of sixty policemen accused of covering-up the deliberate targeting and assault of student protesters at the 1998 G8 economic summit was getting underway. In a surprising act of judiciary independence, the high court had ignored political pressure from all sides and pressed the investigation through, but this was still a critical time, and police were out in even greater numbers than usual. The violent tensions of the near and distant future also wind their way into Bolognese consciousness, adding, like the excavated remains of the Roman Via Emilia, yet another layer of complexity to this place.


The atrium of the Sala Borsa


The Communist bookstand