April 23: Bologna

Previous day: travel (no blog entry)

Traveled to Italy on Lufthansa, with a connection to Bologna via Air Dolomiti in Munich. Both were fine; as a nice touch, both offered free wine and beer on the plane. (Yes, Europe is more civilized than North America.) In Bologna, we'll be staying at Il Cortile del Nespolo. We took a cab to our B&B, and caught our first (sleep-blurred) images of Italian urban life. Barbara is our lovely, friendly, chatty hostess, who in addition to running a B&B, is home-schooling an 8-year old, which she tells us is exhausting work.

More than a little exhausted, since I can't sleep on planes. Took a 15-minute nap, then went out to wander around town to immerse ourselves gently back into Italian culture and let the sunlight get us back on local time. First stop was to get a SIM card for our phone from TIM ("la Tua e-mail In Mobilita" = your mobile e-mail) so that we’d have emergency contact if anyone needed to reach us or vice versa. It's good to have an emergency phone when you travel. Shoshanna loves doing the research for such things, and she found the TIM service offered the best price. Fortunately, there's one a short walk from our B&B. Bologna is a city of colonnades, and we walked along this one just outside our B&B to get to TIM:

Bologna colonnade

I had enough Italian to explain why we were at the store and what we wanted (Shoshanna had pre-paid for the SIM), and even to ask the clerk to help us test the phone by calling to ensure that the SIM worked. Took quite a while, as the clerk was seemingly a recent hire; fortunately, her boss arrived and helped her figure things out.

We wandered down Avenida Ugo Bassi to Piazza Maggiore (the city’s central plaza, inside the old town walls) and spent the next several hours exploring the buildings around the plaza, including some Roman ruins recently excavated from under the central library. My particular favorites were the luscious produce stores, the cheese shops, and the butcher shops, with every available inch strewn with merchandise. Here are the old walls outside the plaza, plus a representative shop:

Bologno, old town walls

Bologna cheese and meat shop

Wandered for hours along many covered colonnades lined with a wide range of shops, from the predictable (dolci = sweets, wine) to the fashionable (high-end brands and small artisinal shops) to the occasional surprise (e.g., a Canadian outdoor wear shop). On first impressions, Bologna seems a very pleasant town. We’re actually thinking of staying here tomorrow rather than going to Modena or surrounds. After all, there's plenty to do here (museums, churches, architecture... food).

Our hostess had recommended a nice old restaurant, but they didn’t open until 8, which was far too late for us—we weren’t sure we’d be awake enough to make it home again afterwards. Lots of birerias (pubs or beer gardens) and enotecas (wine cafés), but they didn’t serve much in the way of real food. We eventually found one place that was open early, Osteria delle Due Porte (“Restaurant with the Two Doors”) but they wouldn’t be open for another half hour—at 7, half an hour earlier than the other places. In Italy, plan to eat late by North American standards, as most places don't open before 7:30! So we sat in the square of St. Francis church, surfaced with cobblestones and cobblebricks and surrounded on the outer edges by concrete benches, and watched kids playing and teens flirting and hanging out, while young parents strolled through with their kids and dog owners with their dogs.

Dinner at Osteria dei Due Porte, Menebrea beer (a decent lager) and house wine (a bit more tannin than I like, but had an interesting aftertaste of cherry—in the good way, not the cough syrup way. As it was 7°C warmer than predicted, it was warm enough to eat on their terrace and watch the passegiata (people strolling home with groceries after work, parents with kids, teens out walking together, and so on). Italian meals tend to be served in courses (primo piata and secondo piata), with side dishes (contorni) where Canadians would just dump everything on one plate. For dinner, we split two primis (first courses): tagliatelli à la ragu (with gently stewed meat and almost no broth left, and a bit of a funkier taste than the regular ground beef that’s used in the false “spaghetti bolognese” in Montreal) and orechia (ear-shaped pasta) with salty ham, tomatoes, and rocket. Pasta cooked to perfection (deliciously chewy), and well sauced. Delish, and too filling to allow for desert.

A gentle stroll home (the restaurant was about 2 blocks away on another street), and early to bed. Hopefully we’ll be on Italy time tomorrow.

Next day: April 24: Parma, Modena, or Ravenna