If you are a commuter from Imola like me, you know Bologna isn’t the “Red, the Fat and the Learned” city of the postcards.
For you, Bologna is simply “Practical”.
Wake up, park, choose between the R and RV Lines, Regionale and Regionale Veloce.
Rush to platform 1 (maybe platform 3), listening for the usual delay announcement.
Get on the train, and soon you are a sardine, pressed between other commuters who know this choreography as well as you do. You stay optimistic about finding a seat, though after years of commuting you’ve learned the trick: the best seats are near the doors, between two carriages.
Then the limbo starts: thirty minutes, thirty-five kilometres. Scrolling your phone without intention, you look out the window as the countryside slides by. And you think about this awkward distance—Imola too close to Bologna to justify moving, too far to fully live it. Imola feels like home; Bologna feels like study and work. For years you’ve been an interchangeable part of the daily commuter machine.
8:30 a.m.: arrival at Bologna Centrale, give or take a delay. More smog, less green. The smell of grilled sandwiches and soggy pastries. Killer scooters, the clack of heels, brakes screeching, overlapping train announcements.
You walk toward the office.
With the works for the new tramway lines, the centre is an open‑air construction site: signs, detours, closed streets, orange fencing everywhere. Via Indipendenza is half blocked, buses don’t run where they should, and the signs send you on alternative routes. Experienced commuters know it is better to walk along Via Galliera, always less clogged. You slip through the side alleys where the city breathes a little easier.
Mid‑morning brings the daily choice: coffee at Scaletto or Gamberini?
Lunch behind Piazza Maggiore or at the Mercato delle Erbe?
The Towers peek out from the end of the street. People say they’ll fall one day, but looking at them—crooked, stubborn, wedged into the earth—it feels more likely the world will collapse before they do.
Evening is the same journey in revense: construction sites, train, sardine, phone.
You are back in Imola under a sky caught between red and dark.
And you remind yourself that belonging often means living in the in‑between: between departure and return, between the home that waits for you and the city that calls you, between the desire to leave and the desire to stay.