Novel set in BELFAST and LONDON
Talking Location With … Tom Benjamin: BOLOGNA
10th July 2025
#TalkingLocationWith… Tom Benjamin, author of The Bologna Vendetta: BOLOGNA
BOLOGNA BITES BACK
Change came so rapidly to Tom Benjamin’s city he recorded it in his mystery series
The sixth instalment of my Daniel Leicester series, The Bologna Vendetta, feels like a prequel and a sequel, flitting as it does between action that took place before my books began (and Daniel’s wife Lucia was still very much alive) and the present (and present tense, a first for the series).
Even Climate Change plays its part – the past is set during the kind of frozen, snowed-in mid-winters that used to be common when we arrived in 2008, while the present takes place during Bologna’s summers which have become ever hotter.
When I began to pen the series, my intention was very much to describe the city I found, and I used the crime format as a ‘way in’, inspired as I was by Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44, his diary as a British secret policeman in the city. But I did not expect that a city which promised limitless mystery but seemingly moved sluggishly through time would transform over the process of just a few years.
Change probably accelerated not long after we arrived, when the Comune began to put in place plans to reinvigorate the city following the financial crisis. But these traditional investments were accompanied by the arrival of low-cost carriers at Bologna airport, the internet – especially the mobile phone – and with it, Airbnb. Together they made a huge difference.
Over the course of my series, we have followed initial resistance to ‘gentrification’ as squatters battled the authorities over an abandoned hospital, the rise of Bologna as ‘food city’ and with it, the proliferation of osterie, complete with faux-aged signage to, in Vendetta, protestors hijacking one of those irritating electric choo-choo trains that drives around the backstreets while tourists gawp from the carriages as if the Bolognese were character actors in an Italian Disneyland (I admit, that scene did give me some satisfaction).
But in 2008 Bologna was clearly not on the ‘tourist map’ – there were far too many competing attractions, especially for the casual traveller to Italy – Florence, Venice, Siena, Rome, not to mention Rimini and Salento. Bologna had more in common with Milan or Turin – a centre of enterprise – and it was actually this that shaped the Comune’s vision. Since we arrived, the city has become home to Italy’s ‘Data Valley’, a massive development with supercomputers from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (pinched from Reading) and ‘Leonardo’ (run by a private consortium part-funded by the EU), tapping into Bologna University’s expertise much the same way Oxford University has helped (re)position its home from a place of ‘dreaming spires’ to one of ‘life sciences’.
Bologna can be counted as part of Europe’s ‘Packaging Valley’ (Philip Morris chose it for this reason, something not celebrated quite so much) and the area is well known as a magnet for luxury vehicle makers – think Ferrari, Lamborghini, Ducati, Maserati – which I focused on for the fifth in my series, Last Testament in Bologna.
These developments have been accompanied by infrastructure projects that would make many a British city’s mouth water: in total more than a billion euros has poured into infrastructure and redevelopment programmes. But the cost has not only been financial – when I interviewed Bologna university professor Maurizio Bergamaschi for the afterword of The Bologna Vendetta, which features activists battling the growth of tourist lets, he explained the ‘commercialisation’ of the city centre can be traced back to the eighties when the communist authorities quietly surrendered to the logic of the market. Now, amid global competition to attract investment, cities are keen to showcase whatever they have to offer. Certainly, in Bologna’s case, this meant embracing tourism.
We all love to travel. As well as revelling in the grit of Bologna, my books are as much about its grandeur, but for a city to be alive it has to be living. Currently, half it’s near five thousand holiday lets are in the historic centre and rents have doubled over the past decade.
Tourists don’t want to be surrounded by other tourists any more than locals do, so a balance needs to be struck, and after going for broke to attract new business, the Comune finally appears to be taking measures to at least assure its new workers have somewhere to live, recently announcing plans to regulate brief lets in an effort to discourage speculation, something housing researcher Dr Mattia Fiore explains is a step in the right direction: ‘It’s a first measure toward regulating the number of Airbnb that can be opened.’
In the afterword to Vendetta, I confess to cheating a little – although my debut A Quiet Death in Italy, was published in 2020, it was really inspired by the Bologna we discovered a dozen years earlier. In a sense with Vendetta, I feel I have finally caught up with today’s city, and especially with the story surrounding Daniel’s wife, closing a particular circle. But while one kind of Bologna may indeed have passed along with those snowy winters, the city hasn’t gone anywhere – it continues to evolve, and this author remains to record it.
Tom Benjamin’s The Bologna Vendetta is now out [photos courtesy the author]
Tom Benjamin
Join team TripFiction on Social Media:
Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction) and BlueSky(tripfiction.bsky.social) and Threads (@tripfiction)
Please wait...
