"Bologna, on way to Tuscany" Bologna by edwis

Bologna (Oh, I know Bologna in NOT in Tuscany, but that is where we started our Tuscan trip, so just read on)
Bologna is a small town with a large university population that gives it some life and entertainment. It is clearly a student town, renowned for its left wing politics and resistance to the main Italian government over the years. It reminded us of a Madison, Wisconsin, in that once you are there, you can have a pretty good day or night, but there is really nothing much to do. My guess is that you wouldn’t go there for a destination or go out of your way to visit the place. Now with that said, we actually had a pretty nice time there.

We arrived on Christmas Eve day; secured our rental car quickly, which we would use for the week or so in Tuscany, and headed towards the historical Centro district. We found public parking to be underground about two blocks from our hotel. Once we got to our hotel, we find that hooked onto the lobby but facing the street, is a real ‘sex shop’ business! Its’ large lit up business sign across the front of the building announce its’ name - “69 Sex Up Your Life”, no kidding. The hotel was nice and the sex shop business presented no problems for us, other than a source of good laughs. We unpacked and quickly took to the streets where we find literally hundreds of young college types scurrying about getting ready for the Christmas holidays. Everything was decorated, lit up and it was a fun experience to mingle about.

All the good stuff in town encompasses a 6-8 block area, as in most little Italian towns, called the ‘Centro Storico’ – all you have to do is find that section when visiting for the first time in an Italian city and you will do all right. As you followed the main street to the right all the way to the end, we found some preserved old water aqueducts which were quite impressive. On the other end of the long street was the main square, Piazza Maggiore.

Just up some steps from the aqueducts, we entered into Montagnola Park. This is a very pleasant, tree lined respite area surrounding a little fountain pond with three giant turtle sculptures spraying water into the air. As you leave the park heading back towards the Centro, you come upon Bologna’s famous Piazzola. This open-air market features hundreds of vendors selling everything from shoes, handbags, clothes, kitchen items, and curtains. Around the edge of the park we also found a number of stands selling vintage clothing, old coats, blue jeans and second-hand clothes. There was even a stand that specializes in second-hand cashmere sweaters. Anything with Bob Marley / dope-smoking on it seemed to be a hot-item to be on display in this area. Prices seemed to be pretty good, but I suspect one needs to use caution.

Bologna has its’ main Piazza (Maggiore) with the massive Basilica di San Petronio, which is the biggest and most important church in Bologna. Then only about one block away is the cathedral of the city (San Pietro) with its origins back to the 10th century. There is a large fountain statue that has little mermaid type figure squirting three streams of water out of each of her breasts. This was my favorite statue of the trip, although the Remus and Romulus suckling from the belly of the wolf statues in Siena rates right up there. Anyway, Bologna is famous for its’ 70 km. of ‘porticos’, interesting and pretty covered arched walkways. Evidently this came about due to an overpopulation problem back in history and to help solve it, they built living units out and over the sidewalks, thus the porticos. Here was clever and effective means of affordable housing hundreds of years ago.

When in Bologna, of course one orders famous Bolognese style meals. We sampled some Tagliatelles with Bolognese sauce; Joan had Lasagna Bolognese style, and also ordered a soup on the menu described as ‘Biologico’ – it turned out to be a three-bean soup. We ordered the ensalata mista, soup, and the pasta for our lunch. The pasta comes out first alone, then the soup, then the salad at the end. With a ½ litre of Sangiovese for 4.50e, we had our first meal of this Italian journey.

On the way to see a special midnight mass, we have some time to spend, so we end up in a local wine bar. The place is all decked out for the holidays, and we get to try some new wines, plus there was an open buffet of warm snacks ongoing at the bar.

On Christmas Eve, we went to the “messe della notte” at the cathedral, which turns out to be very beautiful event complete with choral signing, and even had two bishops running all the pageantry. They paraded a long procession around the church with the heavy incense filling the air. The visiting bishop must have been some real big deal, for Italian TV was filming the whole thing. Looking around we noticed the five waiters who were serving us at the wine bar just a few hours earlier. A stop for early morning pizza slices after the mass extravaganza on the way back to the hotel made the night complete.

The next morning we headed for the main piazza and had our pictures taken with the street Santa and his reindeer statue. There were crowds of people and balloon vendors having a good holiday time. We say farewell to Bologna and take to the road.