RAVENNA AND BOLOGNA

Ravenna is the mosaic capital of Italy – even though we had previously been told that Florence held that honor.  I guess it’s like Annapolis and Newport, Rhode Island both calling themselves the “sailing capital of the world”.

Once away from the sea, the whole character of the area changed as we went from beach town to a marshy estuary. Little fishing boats were docked in front of large shacks on stilts along the meandering Po River Delta which looked very much like the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Each shack had a large seine net hanging in the air to dry and looking like bird nets. And just like back home in the Land of Pleasant Living, the shoreline was even covered by that unstoppable Eurasian invasive phragmites.  I felt like I was driving around Chincoteague Bay.

The road west to Bologna followed a busy motorway with numerous tolls.  All of the Italian highways pretty much look alike, two-to-three lane divided highways with no shoulders and everybody hauling ass in tiny cars.

This could have easily passed for the Eastern Shore of Maryland, except the white clapboard homes of Talbot County had been replaced by large, block-like brown or dull yellow brick farm houses.

Bologna is Italy’s 6th largest city with 385,000 people.  It is a rich city, home to banking and insurance.  It is the home to Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, and all the super-fast Italian autos that end with an i.  And this is also where they make Ducati motorcycles.  Speed rules in this part of Italy.

Bologna has three nicknames:

2. “The Fat One” because it is known as the food capital of Italy.  It is also the Gelato capital where they make the world’s finest gelato machines.  According to our guide Sophia, the locals love to eat and they are noticeably heavier than the rest of Italians.

3. “The Red One” because of their red buildings and roofs.

In the Middle Ages, Bologna was one of Europe’s largest cities, with almost 60,000 people, and the historic City Center has been remarkably well preserved.  Basically, it’s a full-on Medieval City from the 12th Century.  When you take into account that as a major railway hub, Bologna was relentlessly bombed by the Allies during World War II, and that it was ground zero for the Italian resistance movement and the scene of relentless street battles, it is amazing that so much of the city’s past remains standing tall.

Bologna is a big muscular city, like Rome, with large stone-block streets and tall solid buildings that seem to loom over the narrow dark streets like windowed walls.  As in most of the old parts of Italian towns, the streets often seem more like alleys.  But unlike the slightly feminine feel of Florence or Venice, Bologna is an imposing masculine town.  It’s all business.

These days, Bologna is probably most famous for its porticoes – enclosed sidewalks with mosaic tiles and carved blocks of stone.  There are 22 miles of porticoes throughout the downtown area.  This means you can walk around most of the old city in the rain – as we did – and stay relatively dry.

Just off the main square, we stumbled onto a large wedding in the building housing the Mayor’s Office where about a hundred sharply-dressed guests waited in a long line outside the arched entrance way.  Italians are total fasionistas who take great pride in their appearance.  They all look like models.  We Americans look like hillbillies in comparison.  And it isn’t just about being handsome people ­– which they are – or their clothes – which are beautifully handmade – but really more about style.  The bride walked into the outside atrium and was stunningly gorgeous in her long, tight white gown.  The audience clapped and we joined the applause.  We felt like we were in a movie.

A jazz quintet complete with drums and horns played an eclectic set of tunes, including the theme from “Star Wars” and “The Pink Panther”, under a portico in front of a closed department store.  Hardly any of the stores were open because it was Sunday, and being a Catholic country the people don’t work on the Sabbath, so everyone was just window shopping even though there was nothing to buy.  It was hard to imagine such a thing ever happening anywhere in America.

Inna wanted to check out the University.  We still didn’t realize that our map was all backasswards, but it was clear that the numbered destinations, including the university, did not correspond to the street names.  We were standing on a busy corner near the Via Zamboni, trying to figure out where the hell we were going, when a smiling and very chipper law school student named Salvatore offered to help.  We asked him how to get to the old university, and he quickly offered to show us the way.

Inna’s son Arthur graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and when I went to the Naval Academy we played lacrosse against most of the Ivys, so we were no stranger to grand old American colleges.  But in comparison to the ancient beauty of the University of Bologna, Harvard looks like Anne Arundel Community College.  There were stunning medieval churches and Byzantine museums integrated into the fabric of the school and it was like stepping back into the Renaissance.  If Dante had come walking out of one of the classroom buildings it would have seemed perfectly natural. 

On our way back toward the city center, we stopped by the lovely Nisea Di Palazzo Poggi-Scienza E Arte Museum that looked amazing, but which, unfortunately, was closed on Sundays, other than the main entrance and stairway.  But even that took our breath away, with its white marble staircase and elegant statuary and mosaics from the past.

We soon found ourselves at a bustling intersection, once again trying to read our squirrelly map, when up popped our young friend Salvi who had finished running his morning errands and offered to give us a guided tour, starting with Bologna’s most spectacular gem, the Basilica Di Saint Stefano, known locally as the Seven Churches, an amazing maze of churches adorned with timeworn frescoes, stone effigies, rare paintings, mosaic ceilings, golden chalices, Byzantine archways, and a museum gift shop that sold a wide selection of religious booze with a very happy, cassock-draped priest at the counter.

After getting the lowdown on a few more grand palaces, and one in particular, the Palazzo Pepoli Campgrande, which had a roof line covered in lifelike human heads, we climbed the tallest tower in town, the Torre Asinelli, with its 500 creaky steps.  We paid the 5€ entrance fee for Salvi to join us and it turned out that it was his first trip to the top of the tower.  He was very excited.  The climb up the narrow, black wooden staircase was scary, heart pounding, and claustrophobic with barely enough room for people to pass one another in near darkness.  But the panoramic view of the city was worth every step, and gazing down on the red roofs of the city, it was easy to see how Bologna earned its “Red City” moniker.

Back on the ground, we walked along the Bologna’s upscale shopping district, its stores all closed, but showing off the latest fashions in their windows like out of the pages of Vogue.  

We came to a busy intersection where we stumbled onto a very strange Peruvian street ceremony that sounded and looked like a New Orleans funeral, with a uniformed band playing a slow march as the devoted carried a golden shrine down the middle of the street as wild old ladies wailed like witches and priests waved smoking incense pots.  The mood was solemnly festive and not what we were expecting to see in a conservative Catholic city like Bologna.  But I guess that Pope Francis, the first South American Pope, has emboldened Latinos to freely worship in their own unique ways.  A beaming old beggar lady dressed in white with her face painted in thick white paint was begging in front of the parade like some zombie Grand Marshall.

Near the end of our tour, we had coffee and beer at an outdoor cafe overlooking Piazza Maggiore and Salvi, who was from the island of Sicily, which sits off the coastal toe of Italy like a football island, patiently answered our questions about modern Italian society.  Salvi’s English was a bit sketchy, and he admitted that the main reason he had befriended us was to practice his English, which was fine with us.  Getting a local guide essentially for free for the whole day was a great deal for us, and Salvi liked answering our questions.  It was a win-win all around.

On the way out of town we passed the busy Bologna Train Station where a white clock sat atop the imposing building’s Romanesque entrance.  The clock is stopped at 10:25, the exact time when terrorists exploded a bomb and killed over 80 innocent travelers in August 1980.  Like America’s 9/11, this national tragedy burns brightly in the memories of all Italians, and bears witness to the fact that our lives can change in the blink of an eye.

It seems stereotypical to say, but Italians who speak English always add an “AH” onto the end of every last word in a sentence.  Like the phrase we kept hearing all the time during our trip to Bologna, “It is a beautiful life-ah.”