Alla Bolognese, con Cinzia e Sergio

Bologna is an exciting place, a bustling commercial center since the Middle Ages, where there's always something going on: shops large and small sell everything from luxury jewelry and designer clothes to €1 housewares, market stalls offering heaps of Christmas trinkets and cheap clothes line busy thoroughfares, long queues wait to enter trattorias and gelaterias and hole-in-the-wall al taglio pizzerias, street performers and political protestors sing and shout to get the attention of passersby, and always there are people out and about early and late.

Bologna is not always pretty. Graffiti is everywhere, some buildings are hundreds of years past their use-by date, and the city has its share of unsavory characters. There are times when you think the whole town needs a thorough power-washing and repainting.

I first visited Bologna in 2001 and was immediately attracted to its gritty, edgy energy. We came again in 2003 and 2005, and now in 2011 the appeal is as strong as ever, which is a little surprising since Bologna doesn't seem to care if I visit or not. The central tourist office is unhelpful and uninterested. There are no museum passes, but then there aren't many museums. The infrastructure for visitors is tied to the many trade fairs held here, so at least it's relatively easy to get to and from the airport.

We've started each day by getting out the map, picking a direction or area unfamiliar to us, and head out that way. An old guidebook and Google have helped narrow down our options, but mostly we're exploring to see what we can find. An old palazzo, a church courtyard, another piazza full of street vendors, a slice or two of pizza and maybe a gelato and by late afternoon it's time for a break. We head back to the hotel and have a lie down before deciding where to go for dinner.

Friday night, however, was something special. Years ago, I started using Flickr to share my snaps, and one of my first contacts there was cinzia_t, who lives near Bologna. As Terri and I planned this trip, I was excited by the prospect of finally meeting Cinzia in person. We exchanged emails and made arrangements to get together for dinner.

Cinzia and her husband, Sergio, took us to Trattoria del Pellegrino just outside the city walls near Porta Santo Stefano. The place was packed with Italian families enjoying the beginning of the weekend.

Terri and I wisely let them do the ordering for us, and we were treated to several different kinds of pasta and meat dishes, all Bolognese specialities, washed down by vino rosso della casa and followed by zuppa inglese. More important than the food, of course, was enjoying the company of our friends. Cinzia is the most bilingual of the bunch, fortunately knowing some English, while Sergio spoke a little English and Terri and I stumbled through our Italian. The language difficulties just added to the fun, however.

After dinner, we went for a long walk into the city. We strolled up Via Santo Stefano as Cinzia and Sergio told us about the churches and markets and piazzas we passed. The walk ended in Piazza Maggiore, the wonderful central plaza of Bologna, and sometime after midnight we finally said arrivederci, with many hopes and plans of seeing each other again soon. The perfect end to a perfect evening.

Today is our last day in Bologna. We had to do some rescheduling because of an Iberia pilots' strike, but we must have had a large balance in our travel karma account because the new schedule is better than the old one. The only bad part is that we have to leave on the first bus to the airport at 5:20 a.m. We are due to be home a mere 20 hours later. Goodbye Italy, Hello Texas.

Here's my Flickr photos from the trip. For those who would rather sit back and let the computer do the work, here's the slideshow version.

The Other Italy

To most travelers, Italy means Rome, Florence, and Venice, with perhaps day trips to Siena or Cinque Terre. There are good reasons for this: those cities are wonders, with enough art, food, history, and charm to beguile the most cynical. But there's another Italy that I love just as much, an Italy that too few people take the time to see.

When we left Venice, we took a regionale train to Vicenza, where we spent three nights. Another regionale to Ferrara and another three nights, then on to Ravenna for three nights. These mid-size Italian cities (and there are many more like them, Parma and Perugia and Verona, for example) have great food with local specialities, fine art and museums, festivals and events. Each one has a population of around 100,000, so a few tourists like us can wander in and not be noticed.

We usually arrive on an early afternoon train, which means that as we walk into town (yes, they're small enough that you can walk from the stazione to the centro storico) around 2 p.m.; the streets are deserted, a ghost town with only a few stragglers and dogs roaming the narrow streets. It's the afternoon break, when all the shops are closed and everyone goes home for a few hours. We check into our hotel and put away our bags before heading out again.

By 4.30 p.m. or so people are starting to come outside and by 5 the shops are re-opened and the bars are again serving coffee and prosecco. By 6 or 6.30 the passeggiata is in full swing: everyone is walking up and down the main streets, window shopping, talking with friends and neighbors, running errands. At this time of year there are Christmas markets in the plazas, merry-go-rounds for the kiddies, and temporary ice rinks for the teenagers. Some of the happiest moments of my life have been wandering around within these evening promenades, seeing and hearing and smelling life in Italy.

Here's Corso Palladio in Vicenza just the other night:

And here's Perugia from a trip back in 2005; different city, different year, same ritual:

By 8 or so we're off to dinner somewhere, eager to try local specialities like baccalá in Vicenza or cappellacci with zucca in Ferrara. We sit down and wrestle with the menu and drink and eat and wonder whether we should get dessert. We leave by 9.30 or 10 and again the streets are dead, no one about, the city gone to bed for the night.

Altogether it's a pleasant and appealing rhythm of existence.

We'll be ending our trip in Bologna, La Grassa, La Rossa or The Fat, The Red. "Fat" because Bologna is known for being wealthy and prosperous as well as having the greatest food in Italy -- mention "Bologna" to an Italian and their eyes will light up as they speak of great dishes -- and "Red" both because of its distinctive red tile roofs and its leftist politics. Several of Bologna's mayors have been card-carrying Communists.

These photos and more over on Flickr.

Wandering Around Venice

It is an amazing thing that within 24 hours one can go from an apartment in Texas to a hotel in Italy. The amazing becomes depressing when one realizes that this time has not improved in over 50 years since the introduction of jet airliners.

This trip we didn't get vaporetto (water bus) passes, so we're walking everywhere. There is no better place in the world to wander; if you've never been here, Google "venice map" to see what a maze it is. There's no grid, no plan, no organization: major thoroughfares may be barely wide enough for two people to pass while some large squares sit empty and silent. Of course there's no wheeled vehicles of any sort except for baby strollers and grocery carts that need to be wrestled up and down the bridges. A walk of five minutes from hotel to restaurant may twist and turn up and down a dozen streets and across several canals. The shortest distance between two points is never a straight line, always a zig-zag.

On Thursday, our first full day in Venice, we revisited major sites and old favorites. We walked from our hotel in Castello near the Ospedale to Campo S. Maria Formosa, then on to the tourist madness of the Rialto Bridge. We wandered through S. Polo on the far side of the Grand Canal and eventually made our way down to Dorsodouro, where we had a delightful lunch at Taverna San Trovaso. We had a gelato as we walked along the Zattere, then headed back over the Accademia bridge to return to Piazza San Marco.

Friday was a day to explore new areas. We headed east through quiet old neighborhoods of Castello, past Arsenale, then along the bustling markets of Via Garibaldi. We visited S. Pietro on its little island, then wandered through eerily quiet residential neighborhoods. Parks, trees, block after block of apartments with no bars, no restaurants, no shops -- it was a Venice we had never seen before. We walked back along the fondamente to the tourist madness of Riva degli Schiavoni and had lunch at a little place down a side street behind the Bridge of Sighs.

Today, Saturday, has been gray and misty. We went to the Correr Museum (where we discovered that the paintings we most wanted to see, masterpieces by Carpaccio and Bellini, were on loan to Tokyo) and a guided tour of the renovated clock tower overlooking Piazza San Marco. Later this evening we'll head out to try a new neighborhood place for dinner.

Tomorrow we'll wander some more and then on Monday we'll head off the beaten path.

These photos and more over on Flickr.