VI.xi. Via Petroni

"The first time I passed through Switzerland I had the impression it was swept down with a broom from one end to the other every morning by housewives who dumped all the dirt on Italy."
- Ernesto Sábato

"It snows in Bologna once a year" is the standard response one gets from a Bolognese after making a comment about the unpleasant February weather. In the past week it has snowed not once but three times, enough to make life in the porticoes even filthier than usual. The city, being north of the Apennines, is supposed to be able to cope with this by hiring a fleet of specially fitted tractors driven by farmers who, otherwise unable to tend to their crops, become snow removal experts.
    Bologna is a medieval city. It doesn't have the pure, perpendicular lines of the ideal Renaissance city. It is more organic than architectural. The streets are crooked and paved with uneven cobblestones which makes clearing them of any accumulated precipitation rather impossible, and the disintegrating stone columns that support the arcades, punctuated by erratically parked cars and streetside dumpsters, are anything but easy to keep clean. It seems as though the only flat surfaces in the city are the terrazzo floors of the porticoes, often beautifully laid out in geometrical patterns, which become a serious slipping hazard when they get covered in the brown slush that the falling snow quickly becomes. Walking anywhere becomes a treacherous endeavour, undoubtedly accompanied by having to help some fur-clad matron up from a fall.
    Via Giuseppe Petroni, a main artery of the university's tertiary economy of copyhouses, kebab joints, and Pakistani beer stores, is particularly bad under the sleet. This part of the city, a stone's throw from my apartment, is in the so-called "Red Zone", named not for political reasons, but rather because it needs to be cleaned daily by public sanitation crews. Inevitably, routinely, obnoxiously, the narrow arcade gets filthier as the day progresses, as the urine, dog excrement, and vomit accumulates on the speckled terrazzo floor. Occasionally, a concerned shopkeeper will cover an offending substance with sand or sawdust, connoting the middle ages in the worst of ways. Eventually, the mysterious stains that characterize much of Bologna become so dense they are practically impassable. Here the infamous "line of grime", the pronounced black line of dirt that can be found exactly two feet up on all exterior walls in the city, is at its strongest. After lunch hour I prefer to take a longer but cleaner route, but earlier in the day it is fine, as the chlorine stench from that morning's cleaning is still strong enough to block any accumulated offensiveness.
    In Piazza Maggiore, cleaner but less congenial than the more humanely proportioned spaces of the University district, crews of non-Italians were clearing the snow that had been piled into the square over the past few days, excavating the Neptune fountain from its cold white burial.


The Neptune Fountain being Excavated


Piazza Maggiore, the world's grandest shoveled-snow depot