June 29, 2008

I arrived in Bologna today from Lausanne.  The train was on time until it paused without explanation for twenty minutes no more than a kilometer from Bologna station.

I took possession of the apartment U––– and I are renting for our week here.  It consisted of a pair of rooms with a bath and enough of a kitchen to satisfy me in an old palazzo.  Thankfully it had an air conditioner, which I at once turned to its coldest setting.  I dropped my bags, and walked back to the station to meet U–––'s train.

The train was eight minutes late.  No one else on the platform seemed perturbed.  Truly, I have lived in Switzerland too long.  But U––– arrived on it.  After she had settled in at the apartment, we took a walk, then had a pizza at 

Pizzeria/Trattoria Belfiore

Via Marsala 11/A

Bologna

Tel. 051/226641

(closed Tuesdays)

We ate at a table out on the sidewalk, where the waiter kept us informed of the progress of the European soccer final.

 

June 30, 2008

Today we saw the sights of Bologna: the university, the botanical gardens, the cathedral, the sanctuary of Madonna di S. Luca on a hill to the southeast, and the view from the tallest tower in the city.

Here I allow myself a rant.  Someone decided long ago that bare shoulders were unacceptable in cathedrals.  Most places have small sign on the door which everyone ignores, but in the last few years the cathedrals of Bologna and Milan have started checking people's bags before letting them in, and enforcing the bare shoulder policy at the same time.  U––– tells me it's worse in Russia, where women must wear skirts and have their hair covered to enter a church.  I find it appalling that public buildings like churches can demand dress codes that would never be accepted in grocery stores or town halls.

The path to the sanctuary of Madonna di S. Luca also deserves comment.  The sanctuary itself is a Baroque church and small cloister on the top of a hill with lovely views of the surrounding country, but the path to it is a loggia several kilometers in length climbing the hill from the edge of the city.  The Bolognese love their arcades, but this verges on the absurd.  Yet we were grateful for the shade on that lovely climb, as we wandered through pools of air scented by sun-warmed jasmine and cedar.

I produced dinner: ravioli with a meat and spinach stuffing, tossed with melted butter and sage, then a pan fried orata, its gut stuffed with a slice of lemon, and fried slices of eggplant.

 

1 July 2008

Today we went to Ravenna by train.  Ravenna was the capital of the Roman empire late in its existance, a town in a swamp chosen because it was hard to attack.  Today it's a sleepy little Italian city except for the presence of San Vitale, the basilica built by Justinian and Theodora, famous for its rich mosaics.  The mosaics haven't the skill and subtlety of the more extensive yet almost unknown works in Aquileia, but they are beautiful nevertheless.

After a long inspection of the basilica and the older, less gold-encrusted mosaics of the baptistry, we sat down in the courtyard and discovered that I had forgotten our lunch!

Remedying this grave situation leads me tell you about

Babaleus

Vicolo Gabbiana 7

which offers a pizza or the lunch buffet, plus a bottle of water, for 7 euros.  We both took the buffet, U––– tastefully sampling the dishes, I descending upon it like a horde of locusts.  There were probably twenty dishes.  Of the ones I tried, all were good except the grilled zuchini (which was slightly bitter).

Thus restored we saw the rest of the mosaics of the city.  Ravenna has a single ticket for all its attractions, probably in an attempt to siphon off some business from San Vitale.  Of these, the mosaics in S. Appollinare are a close second to San Vitale itself.

A final recommendation in Ravenna: the gelateria Nuova Monde across the street from the train station has very good gelato.

We were both tired and not that hungry after our enormous lunch, so dinner was prosciutto and canteloupe, then a frittata with onions.

 

2 July 2008

Today we went to Florence, an hour's train ride to the north of Bologna. I had never been there, scared off by tales of endless bogs of tourists and endless lines to get into anything.

We arrived at Santa Maria Novella, the main train station, paid a euro for a decent map of the city at the tourist information office, and walked south.  There were stands selling souvenirs and the leather goods for which Florence is famous, and lots of people.   The stands quickly vanished as we proceeded south.  The people didn't.

Our first stop was Santo Spirito, one of the places my father dredged up from his memory of the city as particularly worth a visit.  It was closed.  Undeterred, U––– navigated to the duomo.  U––– did all the navigation, and I shuffled along behind with no responsibilities whatsoever, except for occasionally locating our exact position on the map for her.  But she has a very strange habit of orienting the map to match the area around her.  Every time she did this I completely lost my sense of direction.

The duomo of Florence is faced in colored marble.  Unlike so many cathedrals which today are plain white or grey, it retains its original bright colors.  We walked around the outside, but the line to get in stretched a quarter of the way around the cathedral.  I put my foot down: I don't wait in line.  We compromised on climbing the campanella, which had no line and gave a wonderful view of the city (but cost 6 euros).

Florence stretches along the valley of the river Arno between gentle, green hills.  The city is quite narrow on the south bank, but sprawls away to the north.  The major tourist sites -- San Spirito, the duomo, the Uffizi gallery,  and Santa Croce -- are gathered along the river towards the eastern end of the city.

We descended from the campanella and walked to the Uffizi to pick up our prereserved tickets.  You must prereserve.  The line without reservation was over three hours long.

The Uffizi gallery is frustrating.  They have a lovely old palazzo on the river and a unparalleled collection, but they manage to make it as ill organized and unrewarding as possible.  Yet their best efforts still fail in the face of the quality of the painting.

I have realized that my approach to art galleries is unusual. I walk into a room, give a cursory glance to everything, pick out the best one or two.  I ignore all the rest, and I don't glance at the captions until I have finished with the painting.  At the Uffizi, I would walk into a room, and a beautiful Perugino madonna that anywhere else would long hold my attention I spared no more than a glance.

The most astonishing piece in the museum is Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus.'  We all know this painting from every book on Italy, the Renaissance, or art history we have ever read, but prints and pictures don't do it justice.  They don't capture the idiosyncratic swirl of the water, Venus's weightless tread on the clamshell, the ethereal coastline in the distance, or the cathedral-like order of the forest on the shore.

Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ hangs in the same room, and the two make a stark contrast.  I can look at 'Primavera' and understand how it is composed.  I can believe if I worked hard enough and were skillful enough, I could compose and even paint it myself.  But in its sibling, no air could actually ruffle water and gowns that way, no gravity could provide that connection of the bodies with the ground, no water could produce the wavelets on the surface.  And yet it all works.  It works so well that U––– had to come back and find me, still gazing at it.

Finally U––– extracted me from the Uffizi and led the way to Santa Croce and, more importantly, the Pazzi Chapel.

Sante Croce is a large and magnificent church with the tombs of lots of famous dead people.  They have the tomb of Michelangelo, the tomb of Galileo Galilei, and one of the numerous tombs of Dante Alighieri which dot the Italian countryside (the number of tombs this man has leads me to conclude that he was a hive mind).

Next to the church is a brick cloister and a plain, stone building known as the Pazzi chapel.  It's everything the church is not: Spartan, hidden, giving the impression of a gazebo hidden in a garden.  The church is a giant cross with the main altar dominating the top.  The altar in the Pazzi Chapel is relegated to a little alcove at the front.  This is a place for man, and the altar is added rather the way a larder is added to a kitchen: you must have somewhere to keep the raw materials for your activity -- a god cupboard if you will.

It seems to strike people very differently.  U––– thought it nice, but not even interestingly decorated.  A tour guide told his flock that the long echo was the most interesting part of the chapel.  And then there were the solitary people, not rapt, but calmly enjoying.  And what did we see?  The shape of the space, a geometry measured for man.

I finally emerged, and after making sure I had seen Galileo’s tomb, U––– led us across the river and up the hill to the southwest to the monastery of San Matteoto.  The view of the city and the neighboring green hills is lovely, the church is comely, but this was actually a birthday surprise for me: U––– never mentioned that monks still chant mass at 17h30 each day until we were they and they were about to begin.  We settled into the crypt of the church and listened to plainsong for the better part of an hour, then left when they started the boring parts of the service where they talk instead of sing.

We mosied back to the train station, pausing to admire the view, to walk across the Ponte Vecchio with its jewelers, to find a truly ugly statue of a pig just to the north of the bridge, and to take pictures in the largely empty Piazza della Signora.

It was almost 21h00 when our train got to Bologna — late, of course.  We tried to go to the Caminetto d'Oro, a restaurant I remembered from traveling here with my family, but found it closed.  A little casting around produced an outside table across from Bologna's last bit of canal at

Trattoria dal Biassanot

(look for the sign of the black cat)

via Piella, 16/a

40126 Bologna

tel. 051 23 06 44

fax. 051 26 07 88

www.dalbiassanot.it

where I had a lovely piece of green lasagna and lamb chops cooked in white wine, and U––– ate green gnocchi in a gorgonzola sauce and veal stewed with wild mushrooms.

 

3 July 2008

Abortive attempt to take a bike ride north to Ferrara this morning, ending with me begin uncivil.  Still speaking to each other, but split up to do our own thing this afternoon. 

I cooked fresh tagliatelli with a shrimp, eggplant, and tomato sauce for dinner, then we ate half a canteloupe and an apricot.

 

4 July 2008

Today we went to Siena, the other great tourist bog of Tuscany.  There weren't nearly as many people as I expected.

Getting to Siena requires getting to Florence, then taking a bus or a once-an-hour local train. From Bologna it's a three hour trip.

It's a Tuscan hill town, too small to really be considered a city, with all that implies: the winding streets stretching along ridgelines and sprawling down hillsides, and the almost Escheresque shape of the buildings which fit themselves to the streets, or occasionally hang across them.

Unfortunately, it's a dead Tuscan hill town.  The only business is tourism, plus a single bank that has persisted for the last few centuries.  It's a pretty fossil, but there is no activity in the streets except the purposeless shambling of the tourists.

Interestingly, there were very few Russian tourists.  Florence was full of Russian tourists, who have apparently stolen the title of "most annoying nationality in Italy" from the Germans, who had only narrowly held it against the English.  Russian tourists are bad enough that U––– claims there are now tours advertised as Russian-free.

The Sienese have had delusions of grandeur for centuries.  They fought a series of wars with Florence until the Medicis finally put them under permanent Florentine rule.  They have a cathedral, and had ambitions of building an even bigger one --- ambitions thwarted by the realities of bubonic plague and soil mechanics --- and were determined to have an enormous main square, though they didn't have a large enough flat space for it.  The square is shaped like half a bowl with the town hall at the bottom.

Today the town hall houses the Museo Civico, which advertises as its main attraction a series of frescos on the effects of good and bad government (the bad government frescos have largely worn away).  This a shame because it's a lovely building, and some of its other frescos are actually much better.

After we emerged from the Museo Civico, I set out to buy food for lunch since we had left too early to buy it in Bologna.  Down a side street we found a fruit store, then a butcher.  The butcher gave me directions to a more general grocer, cleverly tucked away on the side of the Piazza del Mercato, site of the city's covered market.

We took our lunch to the far end of the covered market, which looks out over the valley beneath Siena.  We shared our bench with a grandmother, watching her grandson run around the empty marketplace, and an old priest awaiting the bus, who cheered on the child and chattered with the grandmother.

After lunch we went to the duomo, which charges admission, and U––– convinced me to wait in line for about ten minutes.  The duomo, like that in Florence, is faced in colored stone.  The inside is lovely, but the high point is the Libreria dei Piccolomini, a room lined with  frescos of scenes from the life of one of the Piccolomini popes above and illuminated book of plainsong below.  After gazing my fill of the frescos, I amused myself sounding out the chants.

As further evidence of Sienese hubris, there is a giant star in the floor with the major cities of Italy at the points: Rome, Milan, Naples…and Siena.

Finally we crossed the neighboring valley and climbed up and along the ridge to the Medici fortress, a classic star-shaped fortification of the sixteenth century.

A little more wandering in the streets, at first intentional, and later unwilling until I took over and extracted us, and we caught the bus out of town.

I have a theory about Siena's popularity as a tourist destination: as the Florentines watched ever more tourists pour into the city, they realized that something must be sacrificed to preserve the surrounding region from thir depradations.  And who better to toss to the wolves than those nuisances in Siena?  For I have to say that Tuscany contains prettier cities and better art than Siena can boast.

 

5 July 2008

Today we went to Cremona.  A word of warning to anyone trying to reach that city on weekends: the direct commuter train from Bologna only runs on weekdays.  We took a local train to Fidenza, and changed to the diretto, which stopped at every hamlet and farmhouse along the track before depositing us at Cremona.

What a relief to step out into a city totally untouched by tourism!  The locals were out wandering around and chatting and the open air market in the cathedral square was in full swing.

We wandered past the Piazza Roma, with its park and its little train for the children to ride, and to the cathedral.  In its coolness, mothers and daughters and groups of old ladies with their purchases from the markets talked quietly in the wings.  An elderly monsignor shuffled around exchanging greetings with them.

Bologna's cathedral only has a marble facade on the front.  The rest is bare brick, and surrounded on all sides by a terraced piazza nearly inaccessible to cars.  Florence's cathedral coyly hides behind buildings.  Siena's tries to dominate its surroundings.  Bologna's looms over its main square.  Cremona's has the feeling of a cheerful dog plopped in the middle of the square, wagging its tail as if to say, "Hi there, I'm a cathedral."

And we had to climb the belltower.

The belltower closed for siesta at 12h30, and we headed east to La Locanda, my favorite restaurant in Italy.

La Locanda

Via Pallavicino 4

26100 Cremona

Tel. 0372.457834 or 457835

Partita IVA 00931110191

U––– again didn't eat that much, but did manage a plate of tagliatelli al pomodoro with slices of parmeggiano and a sprig of basel.  I could not resist the tagliolini with duck ragu followd by prosciutto and melon.  We were the only people there, as they were planning a big buffet for Saturday night.

After lunch I dragged U––– through the violin collection at the Palazzo Muncipale, across the square from the cathedral, and then the Museo Stradivari which has a detailed exhibit on how to make a violin.  She put up with the whole thing and assured me she was having fun.

The Museo Stradivari is part of the Museo Civico, otherwise devoted to Cremonese art through the centuries.  It's a nice collection, but the violins are more fun.

We had just time to drink an orange juice at a table set out under the Palazzo Muncipale's loggia and admired the cathedral, before we had to catch our train.

The train back to Fidenza consisted of a single car.  The conductor drove it with abandon, bouncing and bumping along the tracks and screeching to a halt at each tiny station, some so small they lacked a sign.

The train from Fidenza back to Bologna differed in two respects from our prosaic ride from Cremona: it was air conditioned, and full of loud, obnoxious youth off to party in Bologna on Saturday night.  I looked over U–––'s shoulder and made comments about her notation while she tried to figure out a calculation.

For dinner I cooked gnocchi in a tomato and cream sauce, then we ate the second half of the melon we started yesterday.

 

6 July 2008

Saw U––– off from the station at 4h00 on the express to Genova, nicknamed 'Espresso.'  Caught my own train at 9h15.  Changed in Milan without incident.