12.
Sandrina Murer, the last female bookmaker at Bologna’s race track.
The public consists of old crows, no ancient pomp and splendour breathe life into the races any more, the sulkies bear only drugged horses and overweight drivers. A slightly grey, windless sky arches over an area depopulated of bettors.
Murer cradles a photo of a shady character in a pick-up watching a camel race in the Niger dessert. She bought it from a junk dealer in Tripoli in a moment of cultural angst. She usually keeps it in the peg booth and when someone asks who’s that in the jeep, she says “it’s a former boyfriend who raises thoroughbred camels”. Ms Murer organises culture like a job on a par with horses.
She’s worked with the Angelica Music Festival and Xing, had French writers of Frontier 20 spray the façades of public housing estates, she’s part of a group of Croatian performers called “Settimana Morta” (Dead Week), lives in a building with retired cops as flat neighbours and gets to work on time. Even this sardonic woman can live a quasi-underground life in Bologna, booking bets at the track from elderly deadbeats and arranging accommodations for junky-anarchist artists from all over. You just can’t think about it too much, I’m not some sort of Ayrton Senna, she says. Sandrina Murer cried for a week when Ayrton died, she saw him as the ultimate cavalryman.