“Bologna Social Club” – RAI Press Office

Among the large Italian cities, Bologna has remained on a human scale for the longest time. It is told in the doc “Bologna Social Club” by Luigi Maria Perotti, broadcast for the first time on Sunday 23 June at 10.10pm on Rai 5. The porticoes that cross it far and wide limit the field of vision of those who pass through it, perhaps penalizing the its intimate beauty, but encouraging sociality like nowhere else. Perhaps because walking along its very long corridors it is easy to meet: being together in Bologna seems to be part of the soul of the city. Mass tourism discovered Bologna late; for years the city’s economy did not need tourists because there were students from all over Italy who chose to study in the oldest university in the world.
This changing set of thinking minds has always meant that in “Bologna the learned” people thought differently than in the rest of Italy. Over the years, movements and counter/movements have been born here and between one glass and another in the taverns, songs and thoughts have been born to which all of us are somehow linked. But then the low-cost airlines arrived and suddenly tourists from all over Europe also arrived in Bologna, attracted by its beauty, but above all by the good food which in recent years has identified the city much more than its historic open-mindedness. The houses once inhabited by students are increasingly becoming bed and breakfasts for short-term rentals and finding a home is becoming a problem. This aspect is changing the face of the “Learned”. But not only. The next revolution that awaits, that of artificial intelligence, risks putting all the knowledge of which the oldest university is the custodian within smart phone reach. In the episode, which attempts to describe the changes underway in the “citadel of knowledge”, Luigi Maria Perotti meets the Bolognese of the 1920s of the third millennium to talk about the Bologna that is, that has been and that which will be.