Bologna Breakdown

About the story

Bologna Breakdown is a free sci-fi comedy thriller serial set in Bologna, Italy, by Lorenzo Conti on Scroll by Sky Scrawl. A glowing device falls from the sky in a summer storm and is swapped, stolen and smuggled across the city in a single day. Free to read online, no account, no paywall. Friday night, a thunderstorm knocks out the power at the Hotel Bella Vista. Nonno Gino Rossi walks in soaked, carrying a warm, humming sphere he found under a portico. He is sure it is a wedding gift. The night concierge, a doctor of medieval law, logs it in the lost-and-found as Item 1,113. It is not a wedding gift. It is the Omega Core, and it reacts to noise. Speak softly and it hums. Shout, and chairs float, chandeliers rise and the same four seconds happen twice. By Saturday morning, everyone wants it. Marco and Leo, two con men who owe €11,400 to a very polite butcher by midnight, steal it by mistake. The Rossi family wants its gift back and its groom found, and the groom is hiding in the wine cellar with a secret about the tortellini. Maresciallo Moretti of the Carabinieri, fourteen days from retirement, wants one big arrest. His Roman partner Vanni thinks it is a gourmet terror plot. A city parking officer wants to ticket all of them. And a tall, polite hiker from Bolzano wants the sphere back before it calls home, if the trattorias would only open before eight. The chase runs through the real Bologna: the porticoes that loop back on themselves, the whispering corners of the Voltone del Podestà, the hidden canal behind the little window on Via Piella, the three arrows of Strada Maggiore, the Two Towers, and a forty-kilo wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano. It ends in Piazza Maggiore, under the summer outdoor cinema, where two families fight about ragù and the whole city is about to get very loud.