A winter Wednesday in northeastern Italy. During the day, the roads filled up with commuters and semitrailers. Long lines of vehicles crept along overburdened superhighways, national highways, and provincial roads. In Padua and Vicenza, as on so many Wednesdays before this one, air pollution was well above the legal limit. Long after sunset, the Mestre viaduct was still a grinding procession of heavy vehicles advancing slowly in both directions: a long smoky conveyor belt bringing freight—legal and illegal—from and to the countries that lie to the east. On that particular Wednesday, four more companies had gone out of business; the largest of the four employed fifty-one people. There were four more now-empty industrial sheds with “For Rent” signs, posted in Italian and in Chinese. Industrial sheds had been the subject of a lecture that morning: a professor of urban studies at the Department of Architecture, University of Venice, had told his class that, with the construction of 2,500 industrial sheds annually, the countryside had lost no fewer than 1,350 square miles of farmland, and that in the province of Treviso alone, there were 279 industrial parks, an average of four industrial sites per municipality.
