It’s Friday afternoon and Bologna is in full swing. Students and workers populate tables peppered around the piazze, and an artist down a side street starts painting the walls while another stands outside a bookshop promoting his new comic strip, humorous variations of the hammer and sickle with captions like “compagni sporcaccioni” (dirty comrades) and “compagni confusi” (confused comrades).

Elsewhere, a young boy plays piano outside San Petronio’s half-n-half façade, and a freshly-pasted poster advises “if something you recognise as being wrong is not being changed, you have to be the one to change it.” It’s the kind of principled slogan that conjures images of young, blue-haired activists, but here in sprightly Emilia-Romagna, there’s another unlikely sect of the population who share its socially-conscious sentiment.