The Voice of Rovigo

According to Marco Polo (at least through the voice of Italo Calvino, who makes him the narrator of his “Invisible Cities”), “Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither one nor the other is enough to keep their walls up. You don’t enjoy the seven or seventy-seven wonders of a city, but the answer it gives to your question “. And perhaps it is no coincidence that Mattia Zoppellaro finds his city in these words. Which he describes in an unsentimental way: “Rovigo has recently been defined as the most boring city in Italy. Perhaps too small to be the called a city, but still too large to be considered a town, it hides among its dense mists a swarm of lives and surroundings on a human scale that smells strongly of italian province. It occupies the heart of eastern Padania, a land crossed by xenophobic retching; in the area, it is the city that currently hosts the lowest percentage of immigrants. Surrounded by Venice, Bologna, Padua and Ferrara, Rovigo plays the role of an imperceptible crossroad, a transit site, a railway junction that is not always worthy of further study. Except feeling the charm of the reoccurring faces, of being called by name, of the eye that feeds on nature: in this city that is born between two rivers, in reality, boredom can be a starting point, a short circuit to activate the creativity.”