IX.i. May Day

"The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned."
- Antonio Gramsci

If there were a holiday most emblematic of Bologna, it would be the first of May. Working holiday extraordinaire, by day the city still seemed to function without any undue sense of celebration. The youth, of course, had been discouraged in their evening revelry by the new drinking laws and in order to distract them from violence a concert was organized in Piazza Maggiore. The main act consisted of an overzealous jazz troop fittingly clad in bright red uniforms. Their presence became known to me as soon as they began, as I could hear the steady thump of amplified music even from the open window of my apartment kitchen. It brought back memories of living in a place ten times as large as Bologna, where the rumbling sound of the city is ever present and goes almost unnoticed.
    Safe among the thousands in the square, it was almost as if the new law had been repealed. The police kept their distance, as they often do when tensions run high, and left the square to the students, who seemed far less interested in the concert than in the prospect of drinking Moretti from glass bottles unmolested. It seemed a fittingly absurd tribute to a largely irrelevant holiday, just another occasion to band together, defy laws if possible, and unwittingly indulge in the laughable.