Ferragosto, or the Day Italy Closes
The centre of Bologna at nine in the morning on the fifteenth of August is one of the strangest places in Europe. The porticoes, which normally funnel a continuous river of people under their arches, are empty. The shops are shuttered — not the ordinary evening shutter but the deep aluminium roller kind, pulled all the way down and padlocked, with a handwritten sign taped to the middle: chiuso per ferie , closed for the holidays, back on the 25th. The famous food shops of the Quadrilatero, the ones with the hanging mortadella and the towers of parmesan, are dark. A single bar is open somewhere near the station, staffed by a man who has clearly drawn the short straw, and a small population of the bewildered — tourists, mostly, plus a few locals who forgot to buy bread — drifts toward it like survivors toward a lighthouse. The city has not been evacuated. It has done something more deliberate than that. It has, by near-unanimous private decision, simply stopped. Thi...
