Piacenza is the endpoint of Belbo and Lorenza’s erratic drive across the Apennines and the setting of a decisive retreat: after Lorenza leaves him there, Belbo resolves to withdraw into the Plan and use its fiction to take revenge on Aglie. The city’s hotel and closed station newsstand frame a shift from a chaotic day in the physical world to the imagined order in which Belbo can dictate events.

The Road to Piacenza

Lorenza steers the journey away from the direct route back to Milan, proposing that they cross the Apennines and find supper near the Po. Belbo studies the map and objects that the route requires them to climb into the mountains after Uscio, pass through Bobbio, and continue to Piacenza. His plan to eat at Manuelina’s fails when the restaurant is full; instead, they stop at a poor village for overcooked pasta with canned-meat sauce. Belbo suspects Lorenza has deliberately brought him to the place where they might encounter Aglie, though he cannot tell whether she means to provoke Aglie or him.

The drive turns more grimly unpredictable after they leave Uscio. Belbo hits a large black dog that has stopped in the road. The animal is badly injured, and the villagers gather around it; some suggest calling the carabiniere sergeant to shoot it. Belbo drives to the nearest town to seek help, but cynically passes through, while Lorenza curses the animals that, in her view, have plagued the earth since creation. The incident leaves the dog suffering and unattended, and the day’s mishaps deepen Belbo’s sense that events have become a cosmic practical joke.

Abandonment in the City

The crossing takes hours, and they reach Piacenza toward evening without stopping in Bobbio. Belbo is tired but expects at least to have supper with Lorenza. With no better option available, he takes a double room in the only hotel with a vacancy, near the station. Lorenza refuses to sleep there. Belbo asks her to wait while he goes down to the bar for a martini, but finds only domestic cognac.

When Belbo returns upstairs, Lorenza has disappeared. At the front desk he finds her note saying that she has found a marvelous train to Milan and is leaving, with the promise that they will see each other the following week. He rushes to the station, but the track is empty. The abrupt departure converts the journey’s uneasy companionship into another defeat for Belbo, who must spend the night alone in Piacenza.

The Plan as Refuge and Revenge

Unable to find a paperback thriller because the station newsstand is closed, Belbo reads a Touring Club magazine. Its article describes Apennine passes like those he has just crossed. In his exhausted memory, the landscape is arid, dusty, and strewn with mineral debris; in the magazine’s glossy photographs, it becomes dream country, a place worth returning to on foot. The contrast turns the day’s arduous route into an imagined landscape even as Belbo remains stranded in the city.

That night, Belbo decides to retreat once more into the Plan, where he can choose who acts, how events unfold, and when they occur. The dog’s injury, he reflects, has somehow helped drive him toward his own destruction. He also decides to take revenge on Aglie by inserting him into the Plan without his knowledge. Belbo’s revenge is private: he expects Aglie, once made part of the fiction, to dissolve into unreality, and doubts that anyone else would understand or value the gesture.

Belbo reasons that if the Plan could reduce Bacon and Napoleon to manageable figures, it could do the same to Aglie. He imagines sending Aglie in search of the map, just as he believes he has freed himself from Colonel Ardenti and Ardenti’s memory by placing him in a fiction better than his own. The file closes with Belbo’s defeated question, “Bin ich ein Gott?” Piacenza thus marks not simply a stop on the road, but the point at which abandonment and frustration push him to treat the Plan as a substitute for control over life.