(FORTUNE Magazine) – Fascinating city, Bologna. Huge basilica right in the center of town. You could play football in the place. Has a Communist mayor, you know. Riffle through the tourist literature they serve up in the hotel, and there is il signor Renzo Imbeni, the head Red, boasting that the hills around the city had been saved from building speculation (speculazione edilizia). Why dollar- dispensing turisti would be expected to exult over diminished housing opportunities for the average Bolognese is a mystery never penetrated by the senior Keeping Up correspondent, who was recently hard at work in the city. In fact, he had bafflements enough to cope with. Assigned to assess the off- track equine economy in central Italy, he spent the better part of a day late in September trying to figure out what was going on in that room off the Via Alberto Righi. The sign outside read Totalizzatore-corse cavalli, hinting that totalizators, races, and horses are all part of the picture. Inside the room, however, things become a bit blurry for an americano. Your correspondent found himself looking up in perplexity at two television monitors near ceiling level. The one at the left offered what seemed to be a ^ Gothic soap opera based in medieval Firenze. Its companion, evidently more germane to the business at hand, kept printing out teletext messages that took a bit of interpretation, even for someone who had foresightedly brought along his Collins Mondadori Dizionario. The messages appeared to be telling us first about these cavalli, which were entering a small hut or refuge (rifugio). Next it seemed that they had elected to depart (partiti) this place. Then they were scampering (sgambano), presumably toward the finish line. In some ways, OTB in Bologna is a big improvement over its counterpart in the Big Apple. For one thing, the management offers chairs for the clienti. For another, it lets you bet several different tracks: Rome, Milan, and Turin were all actionable on the day your agent was conducting his research. However, this intercultural analysis would be incomplete were it to omit one awkward detail about horseplaying in Bologna. The present writer stumbled upon it when a cavallo named Daveira won the fifth at Milan and consternated him by paying only 14,000 lire to holders of 10,000-lire tickets. It seems that the ''takeout'' -- the amount taken out of the betting pools before winners are paid off -- is a horrifying 37%. The figure compares with a bad enough 23% at New York OTB parlors, and we would wager heavily that you could find plenty of Bolognese who identify that percentage as a larger social problem than building speculators.