Crime mystery set in BOLOGNA

30th May 2022

Requiem in La Rossa by Tom Benjamin, crime mystery set in Bologna.

If you want inspiration for where to go in Italy, and Bologna is on your radar, then the novels of Tom Benjamin will inspire you to visit in person and marvel at this beautiful – and often overlooked – city. The author lives in the city and brings the full colour of the historical buildings and the ambience to life, both the positives and the negatives.

The cover of the book shows some of the UNESCO porticos that are an integral part of the city, built to project over the pavements to offer more floor space to residents above and of course offer shelter from the strong sun during the Summer months. The cover in fact is one of the author’s own photographs and if you follow him on Instagram you will be able to enjoy a virtual tour of the city through his amazing photography (link below).

This is no. 3 in the Daniel Leicester series, who is tasked with looking into the young man charged with a purported mugging, which ended in the death of the victim, a professor of music. He has to prove the innocence of the perpetrator, a young man who has been involved in drugs and perhaps hasn’t made too much of his life to date.

The inspiration for the novel came from a visit the author took to the International Music Museum and Library, where he became aware of the history of some of the instruments and the order of sisters at Santa Cristina, women who had been incarcerated by their families – at one point 13.8  per cent of Bologna’s total female population (around 30,000 women) were nuns. After learning about their plight, he was determined to slide into the narrative some kind of tribute to them.

As a reader the author’s full application of the culture, music, food (of course) and history and this series is a wonderful way to learn about Bologna – I guarantee you will want to visit, so I hope the author has a good and fruitful relationship with the Bologna Tourist Board!

Tom also wrote a piece for our #TalkingLocationWith ... feature which you can read here.

Tina for the TripFiction Team 

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