Ferrara on Two Wheels

Today we went to the nearby city of Ferrara, just a half hour by train from Bologna. We had planned to go to Ravenna to see the mosaics, but yesterday I met with my Italian tutor and it happened that we were reading an article about Ferrara . The article discussed the fact that there are 2.7 bicycles per inhabitant and that 87 percent of the population use bikes as a mode of transportation. The reason for these astounding statistics is that the historical area of Ferrara became a pedestrian zone after World War II, decades before other cities even considered it. I was intrigued and since Boris has become such a bike nut here I thought that this would be a treat and would make the viewing of museums and palazzi go down easier. So Ravenna was postponed and Ferrara was our new destination.

Leaving the train station we found a bike rental shop right away, one of several in the city. For about ten dollars per person we each rented bikes with locks included. They were fitted out with those mousetrap rack things in the back and mine even had an adorable basket. Getting into the historical part of town went pretty smoothly. There are separate bike paths set well away from the roads. Once within the city gates the situation changed a bit. On the bright side we were able to cover a lot of ground and it was enjoyable being part of the passing parade. The downside was the chaos of the traffic in the narrow multi-use streets. Bikes mingled with pedestrians, each pretty much ignoring the other. I know that when I’m walking on the bike/walking path at home I hear these perky alerts every few minutes: “ On your right !” as a bike passes me at blazing speed. There is none of that communication here, but for the most part everyone seems to coexist. Being used to it must be a tremendous help. The trickiest part is that the pedestrian streets aren’t totally without cars. Taxis and service vehicles are allowed and at one point a whole street became clogged because a garbage truck was making its rounds. The street was so narrow that unless we wanted to tag along with the truck all morning we had to practically flatten ourselves against the walls of the flanking buildings in order to pass.

The vehicles at least stick to conventional traffic rules. The bike-riders on the other hand are operating by their own inner compasses. They aren’t rude intentionally, but if somebody wants to cross your lane to buy an espresso they’re just going to go ahead and do it. Intersections were the absolute worst. The biker who has the right of way is the one who believes he has it.

We attempted to follow the bike path that is supposed to be on top of the city wall but I’m afraid we made a hash of that and somehow lost the wall. Or the wall stopped. It’s really hard to say which. We did however manage to find the ugliest square block in the city with derelict graffiti-covered warehouses. Yep. We’re definitely the people you want to team up with on The Amazing Race.

All in all I would say that I enjoyed Ferrara except for the bike experience. Ironic isn’t it ? The very thing that enticed us to go there was the thing I liked the least. It has very few tourists and the people were very friendly. If the tourist sites are few, the singular atmosphere makes up for it. With so few cars and so many people pedaling along, its as though everybody in Ferrara is part of a very quiet procession. As the day became more cloudy the atmosphere became more dreamlike. At times I felt as though I was inside a painting or a stage-set in which everything has less weight than ordinary things. This sensation of lightness, of freedom, reached its zenith for me at the moment I returned the bike.

Bologna on a Sunday

I saw this hanging in a Palazzo we visited yesterday..

Clearly it is a Renaissance Disco Ball.

Looking for something a little unusual in a Bed & Breakfast ? Do you find the typical B & B too short for your liking ? Look no further ! This tower has a couple rooms for rent. It's right in the middle of Bologna and if you get lost on the winding city streets you can probably spot it looming over the other buildings. Just don't get it confused with the other towers nearby. In the closeup the windows above the entry show where the rooms are.

The sign on the door says that an upper room is available for wedding receptions. No mention of an elevator however.

Walking and Talking

I have come to the conclusion that I am a really out-of-shape. Yesterday we spent several hours walking around, having a look at the museum of Medieval History. It wasn't a particularly demanding sight-seeing day as those things go, but by the time we got home every muscle in my legs ached. This I don’t understand. Bologna is flat and surely my years of living in central Virginia with its hilly if not mountainous terrain would have given me the requisite physique for this trip. I’m beginning to think that the aches and pains are due to walking on stone. Bill, on the other hand, thinks it’s because when I speak Italian to people I get on my tiptoes, putting undue stress on my calves. And he may be right. Why I do this is anybody’s guess, but it does take every bit of my attention to carry on a conversation in Italian and I probably tense up. So, in order to improve my conversational skills and hopefully get off my tiptoes I am going to take a few individual lessons at a local language school. Hmmm... taking a language course to improve my physical fitness. That has to be a pretty unusual strategy.

I stopped by the school yesterday and took a test to determine my level. It was Upper Intermediate, which was disappointing to me. Surely all those years of practicing and studying should give me a higher rating, but sadly, I’m not a detail-oriented person when it comes to language. I can never remember when to use in, a, or da. I am a busy person and I just don't have time for a lot of prepositions. At any rate, I’m glad that when I answered the self-evaluation question (before getting my test results) I selected the response “I have a good knowledge of Italian” instead of “I have such an amazing fluency in Italian that it borders on the poetic.” That really would have been embarassing.

Awkward segueway coming up here. Speaking of conversation, which I sort of was a moment ago, when we left our apartment yesterday afternoon to go to the park, we passed a group of four women in a courtyard just down the street. They were sitting on benches in animated conversation. When we returned home two hours later they were still there, still animated. It is amazing to me how central conversation is to Italians of every age. By way of comparison, think about the times you might have taken your child to the park. (If you live in Charlottesville Pen Park is a good example—large enough to have a decent sized sampling of people.) Think about how many of the parents are on cell phones while their kids are playing (including you or me). A lot right ? Maybe half the parents there ? That hardly ever happens here in the Bologna parks. The large one a few blocks from our apartment is packed with kids and parents after school. While the kids are playing,the parents are talking. Certain areas of the park seem to be reserved for the seniors. These are the areas with several benches grouped together. Every afternoon we find groups of them in animated conversation. I am interested in the fact that it is always men and women together. They are generally dressed very well, the women in dresses and the men in “grown up” slacks. It is very rare that you would see a man in his seventies in jeans. And cell phones ? Hardly a one.

This after-school park ritual has been a wonderful opportunity for us. Boris has met kids that he can ride bikes and play soccer with, and Bill and I have gotten to know some of the parents. When you start to speak to the residents it is almost like a curtain is drawn back and you see parts of Bologna that you miss in the guide books and tourist areas. So, now we know where to buy the best lasagna. We learned what the schools are like. We have commiserated about how boys hate to do homework. We found out that the reason the playground is roped off was that a child died last year falling off a deteriorating swing. Now the city has to check every single bold and chain on every piece of equipment. Which will apparently take months.

With my newly acquired information about where to get the best lasagna, I headed over to the local pasticceria yesterday. The price for a small container was shocking. So shocking that I can’t even bring myself to write down the price in this blog. But I paid up and brought home the precious container. When I told Bill what I paid he asked why I bought it. Well, that was the first thing he said after he recovered from fainting. I answered, “Because I didn’t want to disappoint you !” Boris nodded his head fervently. He had been looking forward to the lasagna all day. So, it has come to a pretty pass. A layered pasta dish has become central to our lives. We think about it all day and we’re willing to pay whatever it costs. I kind of get the whole drug addict thing now.

Chinese Food Bolognese

When I was growing up, Sunday night was Chinese restaurant night. We kept the tradition temporarily alive last night as we headed over to Nuova Cina Ristorante (New China) a couple blocks from our apartment. It really looked strange to see “China” and “Ristorante” sharing a sign. By the way, the Cina is not a typo. To get the “ch” sound in Italian you put a C before an e or i. Adding an h gives it a K sound. So there you go, a mini-lesson in Italian pronunciation.

The restaurant looked exactly like a Chinese restaurant back in the states with shiny Chinese landscapes rendered in various colored foils. The menu confused us for awhile. Half of it was devoted to various types of ravioli and spaghetti. Since we chose this place in order to take a break from those items I have to say we were a little disappointed. Not to worry though. I spotted Sweet and Sour chicken which I haven’t eaten since probably 1965, and as I ordered it memories of Pekin House in Chicago enveloped me. I wish I could have gotten a drink with an umbrella in it, but that did not appear on the menu. (At the Pekin House my grandmother would have ordered a “Whiskey Sour but not Too Sour.”) Bill opted for Chicken with Peanuts. Boris really wanted a stir-fried noodle dish, but when we didn’t see anything like that on the menu I tried to explain to the waitress that in the United States we often ordered “lo mein” in Chinese restaurants when we wanted noodles. Well, I don’t know what reaction I was expecting. I guess I was hoping that by saying “lo mein” I would impress her with our amazing Chinese food expertize. Maybe she would give me a special wink or whip out a special menu for Those in the Know. In reality all I got was a blank stare. So we took our chances (or let Boris take his chances) and ordered Spaghetti with Vegetables and Pork for Boris. We avoided but were intriged by the Spaghetti al Riso, spaghetti with rice. Could that actually mean spaghetti and rice mixed together ? Well, when I saw various plates being brought out to other customers it dawned on me that Spaghetti al Riso were rice noodles. Aha ! The light dawned ! So, spaghetti was just an all-purpose word for noodles and ravioli was the term for dumplings ! It all made so much sense ! Boris’s spaghetti was comprised of “glass noodles” and looked pretty much like something we would order in a Chinese restaurant at home.

Our food was reassuringly slow in coming which suggested that they were actually cooking it instead of nuking it. Everything was pretty good and pretty cheap. It wasn’t especially memorable, but as my mother used to say, “Not every meal can be a gem.”

Everything Looks So Italian !

Before I visited Italy the first time twenty years ago, I had the idea that it would look like the United States, maybe with some international traffic signs thrown in for variety’s sake. I imagined that each city would have a very authentic, very picturesque Italian section but would otherwise look like northern Virginia with a higher speed limit. No doubt I got this idea of Europe in general and Italy in particular from the time we went on vacation to New Glarus when I was in high school. In case you didn’t know, New Glarus is the Switzerland of Wisconsin. In fact it was such an authentically Swiss experience as I recall, that there was actually one block on the main street where the personnel working at the diner, the donut shop and the hardware store dressed in dirndls and lederhosen. That was some trip. Boy did I ever feel like we should have packed our passports !

With that vacation as my frame of reference, you can probably appreciate my surprise and delight when I discovered that everywhere I went in Italy looked, well, Italian. I still get a kick out of this. The other day I was walking down the street and on the ground in front of me was a bug—an Italian bug. I bent to examine it and much to my delight found that it really didn’t look any bug I’ve seen at home. It was kind of like an oversized lady-bug, without the spots and it was bright red. Oh I know not everything here is unique. The grass we walked on today looked just like the grass back home. But sometimes I am so overwhelmed at how uniquely Italian my surroundings are that I just want to say, "Stop ! Stop ! You're killing me !"

If I had to specify one main difference between being here in Bologna and being home it is the sheer amount of visual detail. I don’t know of any other way to say it. For example, there is a porticoed building on Via San Stefano which is punctuated by portraits from Roman mythology. I think that the satyr in the photo is quite dashing In addition to the many reliefs, numbering about twenty, each of the columns' capitols is sculpted with a different design. My guess is that these designs carry on the theme of the sculpted portraits. You might think that a building of such visual interest would show up in a guidebook, but it doesn’t. It is just one of innumerable fascinating buildings that you can discover throughout the city.

The ease with which we bump into interesting places has actually created a little bit of conflict with Boris. Everyday he wants to know what the plan for the day is. I guess he wasn’t paying attention when I told everybody I knew, and some total strangers too, that there is NO PLAN. What we really want to say to Boris is, “Well we plan to wander aimlessly until we get hungry. Then we’ll have a snack and strike off down a street we haven’t walked on before and then we’ll stop for a capuccino.” Surprisingly, this does not sound like a fun day to a ten-year old so we try to come up with little projects, or as I think of them, “faux projects.” Like tomorrow he’s going to go buy orange juice for breakfast. That should provide a wonderful opportunity for him to use the first-person conditional form of volere: vorrei, “I would like…” when he asks for it at the store. Plus we’re out of orange juice. Bill and Boris have also gone on sketching expeditions, picking out various architectural details. The other day Bill read that if you take the underpass below Via Ugo Bassi, one of the major thoroughfares of the city, you can see the remains of a Roman road. So that’s another little project for us. And you can buy cake around there.

I Survived Gardaland !

Boris has willingly gone along with Bill’s and my compulsion to visit every church and intriguing little courtyard in Bologna. He has been patient in restaurants and hasn’t complained too much about living in a country without ranch dressing. I kept all this in the forefront of my mind when we visited Italy’s answer to Busch Gardens: Gardaland. Yes, Gardaland. Not Terra di Garda. We stayed in the town of Peschiera del Garda, a two-hour train ride from Bologna. It is not the most beautiful part of Lake Garda but has a wonderful historical area where our hotel, the Hotel Bell'Arrivo was located. We were given a corner room with the best view we have probably ever had from a hotel, looking out onto the lake and the canal.

On our second day we took the Free Bus to Gardaland, just five minutes drive from the station. Once inside the park, we encountered a very large castle and several strolling “characters” dressed in medieval style. One of these was playing trumpet, and believe me, it really added to the sensation of stepping back into the Middle Ages when he played his rendition of “YMCA.”

The park mascot is Prezzemolo, (parsley in Italian), a multi-colored Barney-like dinosaur. (In fact now that I've seen multi-colored Prezzemelo in celluloid and plush, Barney, by comparison embodies the cool of James Dean.) Prezzemolo is EVERYWHERE. If you want to bring one of him home with you, you can go into the gift shop and buy a small, medium or large one. There are about ten thousand of them on the shelves, which is actually kind of scary. Perhaps you would rather have a tee-shirt. Well, you can have Prezzemolo on a tee-shirt. Looking for a tee-shirt with something a little different ? How about Prezzemolo on a beaded tee-shirt ? It's pretty much Prezzi (if I may be so bold as to give him a nickname) or nothing in the apparel department. I would say that the teen and preteen demographic is underserved. Unfortunately for Boris, there were no articles of clothing with rollercoaster imagery so he wound up with a Prezzemolo hat, and you know what? …once you get it away from the other 9,999 Prezzemoli it isn’t bad-looking.

Because it was so late in the season and everyone is back in school, there were absolutely no lines. Boris was able to go on every rollercoaster, inverting and looping to his heart’s content. As far as differences between this park and an American one, I would have to say that the environment, the sculpted set-pieces were amazing in their detail and workmanship. You’d have to think that if Bernini were alive today he wouldn’t be designing fountains in Rome, he’d be the head sculptor at Gardaland, creating the Atlantis environment as shown here. I really loved this. It made me feel like I was in one of those epics with Victor Mature. I kept saying things to Bill like, “Hercules, you may have the strength of 1000 men but I will vanquish you with a flutter of my eyelashes.” Fortunately everyone around us was speaking German and hopefully didn’t understand me. Or if they did, I’ll never see them again anyway.

Everywhere there were these wonderful environments that framed various rollercoaster and spinning apparati. One resembled a Cambodian temple, another was vaguely Turkish (or maybe that was the snack bar) and a huge Space Station commanded a few of the whole park. Because Gardaland isn’t divided into “lands” a la Disney and Busch, you’d get these improbable juxtapositions: the Space Station looking down on Atlantis, for instance. It all made me think of the original Star Trek, the ones where they’d land on a planet ruled by women resembling the Bond Girls.

We spent six hours there and then successfully persuaded Boris that it was time to leave. I hope when he looks back on Gardaland, the major event of his life, he’ll stop a moment to remember the little things: the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, the Grand Canal.

Paper Windows

As most of you know, the artwork that I do--at least when I used to do artwork which seems like a long time ago--was made of folded and cut paper. Naturally I had to get pictures of a couple stores in Bologna that use paper to create some fantastic window decorations. The one at the right was one of several all in white.

These are from the windows of

Hermes.

Maybe I should bring my portfolio over to Urban Outfitters when we get home. !