Il Sentiero Luminoso, da Bologna a Milano

After the success of The Path of the Gods, Wu Ming 2 returns to walk along the High Speed Railway route, from Bologna to Milan. A journey on foot among the industrial warehouses, the damp ditches and the rich countryside of the Great Plain: a new challenge for the defense of the right to landscape and travel. Stories, anecdotes, legends: a book on the territory, an alphabet of places, a collective writing of an ecosystem. Is it possible to cross the Great Plain on foot, without being hit by an articulated lorry? And how many stories can be found, written on the land between Bologna and Milan? Is it really true that «in the plains the TAV did no damage» and «the environment was already degraded»? Is there another Padania, beyond the warehouses and the damp ditches, the corn fields and the flat boredom? After walking from Bologna to Florence, on the ridges of the Apennines and among the pages of The Path of the Gods, Gerolamo returns, backpack on his shoulder, to join two large Italian cities by force of steps: Bologna and Milan, from Piazza Maggiore to Piazza Cathedral. This time, however, there is no path already traced, there are no red and white CAI trail signs and not even the hiker's maps at 25,000. Gerolamo has to build his route one meter at a time: he collects information on places of interest and dirt roads, frequents forums for travelers and cyclists, visits the geoportals of Emilia Romagna and Lombardy, spends the nights on digital and satellite maps, learns everything what you need to know about GPS navigators. And when he finally leaves, he discovers that to get to Milan he will have to commit various crimes, from housebreaking to land invasion. Yet he proceeds, in a renewed challenge against high-speed rail and land consumption, determined to reclaim his right to landscape and travel.