The Yellow of Bolzano
Missing or Murder?
On January 5th, 2021, Benno Neumair reported his parents missing from the house they shared on the edge of Bolzano, Italy. Bolzano is in the Alto-Adige region or Italy — northwest of Venice, in the alps, near Liechtenstein. It’s an area where the locals speak German rather than Italian. In fact, when I was at a language school in Bologna, learning Italian, one of the other students at the school was a man from Bolzano. That’s right — he was in his mid-twenties, grew up IN ITALY, and was learning Italian.
This case is what the Italians call Un Giallo — a yellow. Why yellow? In the late 1920s, Italian publisher Mondadori was looking for a way to distinguish their line of mystery/crime books at bookstores and newsstands. They decided to make the covers of these books yellow. Their brightly covered books became so popular, that now, in Italy the whole mystery genre is referred to as Il Giallo. Even real-life mysteries are referred to in this way. The mystery in question here is called Il Giallo di Bolzano.
