We spent the Easter weekend in Bologna, a continuation of our commitment to explore Italian towns and cities. This time I was enthused about having passed the A2 level two-language test. Just having that validation has made me feel less nervous and angst-ridden about speaking the language. Many Italians shift to English when they notice your discomfort, but I’ve been enjoying the challenge of sustaining the conversation in this faulty tongue. I can now order at a restaurant, understand the announcements at train stations and even ask for directions or give directions if necessary. I’m still working my way through the sentence constructions and frequently make many mistakes. But I’m finally having fun with Italian and feel this eagerness to continue and a desire to master all the many different tenses the language boasts.

We picked Bologna because it was on our list and we had two days and nights to explore. But it’s really such an outdoor city, with all its porticoes, that our trip felt relaxed. On the first day, our child decided to take a fairly long nap and I thought we had to seize the opportunity to do something we wouldn’t otherwise we able to do as smoothly if he were awake. So, we made our way to the museum for modern and contemporary art, cutely abbreviated to MAMBo. I have been ‘studying’ Italian art institutions since 2018, learning more about strategies of display, noting down instances that attest to the existence of curatorial intelligence in framing the exhibitions and the many moments when there seems to be none, or the curatorial consciousness is discernibly right-wing fascist. I hesitate to use the word fascist, but it is so uniquely and irrevocably tied to modern and contemporary Italian history and politics. One can see, if one looks, how the absence of any form of collective reckoning with Italy’s complicity with fascism has left too much room for its ideologies to continue to perpetuate. There have been myths constructed about how Italians suffered under fascism, but little is written about how they also actively endorsed its rise. A scenario like this explains why one would find a sculptural work titled ‘Head of Mussolini’ unironically on display. Were it Hitler’s head, there would have been hell to pay.