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We took the train from Bologna Centrale to Ravenna on December 28 (Wednesday). The trip took a little over an hour, and it was foggy most of the way. In fact, it was foggy for most of our 3-day visit, apparently not unusual for this time of year.
Ravenna is a city that interested us when we had the idea to move to Italy. It is in flat farmland, is not overwhelmingly large, has a lot of art and history, is near the Adriatic and a couple of pine forests, and has an opera house and a classical music festival in the summer. All good things. We also hoped that the air quality would be better than in Bologna, but at least in the winter, that seems not to be the case. Naturally we wanted to see the famous mosaics in the ancient churches and also explore some of the neighborhoods where we have been looking at apartments online. We did all of that; we saw all but one of the UNESCO sites, and did a lot of walking. We also took the local bus to neighboring Classe to see Sant' Apollinare Nuovo, and we rode another bus for a while to get a tour of the oceanside area, though the fog made seeing the ocean almost impossible. The host at our hotel recommended a restaurant, Passarelli, and we went there for dinner twice. The food was really good, and we also had nice experiences meeting people there. The first night we met a young father, Niccolo, and his charming 3-year-old daughter, Lucrezia. On Thursday we had a long conversation with our waitress, who is from Moldavia. We also met a couple from Switzerland: the husband is a college professor of percussion (and a composer of percussion music) and an active maker of mosaics, and his wife is a grade school teacher. They spoke better French than Italian, and we supplemented with English. In further posts I will talk about more specific places and experiences.
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I decided to give my aching feet a rest yesterday, so we did not walk for miles, as we have done since we got out of Covid prison. However, we did walk to a pharmacy, which we picked out for 3 reasons: 1) it was nearby 2) its website said that it supports LGBT people 3) the proprietor is a singer-songwriter, Federico Aicardi. Mr Aicardi was there, in his small pharmacy-shop, and must be one of the friendliest people I have ever met. He showed us several books by a famous writer that he knew, Fernanda Pivano, who knew and translated many American authors, from Hemmingway to the Beats and beyond. Federico is charming and enthusiastic about music, Bologna, and everything else that we talked about. He also gave us a CD of his music, called "I Love Bologna," which is the name of the title track. You can hear the song on Aicardi's YouTube channel: We had a lovely time chatting, and he invited us for an apertivo at the bar-club where his band plays regularly. We plan to go, certo! Here are some sounds that we heard yesterday. We see (and hear) very few birds in Bologna except for pigeons. However, yesterday we heard a bird that sounded a lot like a mockingbird. It was perched on the chimney of a 3-story apartment building on a rather busy street. We listened to it for a while; we thought that it sang louder as cars went by - a competitive kind of bird! I post a short sound clip below. The sound clip below is from Santo Stephano, bells that we heard from a courtyard. It was quite loud and almost danceable. Careful - the sound is quite loud.
We had a quiet Christmas; we spent some time sending greetings to family and friends, then took a long walk southwards. We explored the area surrounding the Margherita Gardens, and decided that it wasn't terribly interesting, though there are a lot of nice houses. In contrast to the busy streets of the city center, these streets were almost entirely deserted. We headed back into the city center and eventually found ourselves at the Santo Stephano basilica complex, which was open and full of people, so we went in. As usual, the pictures I am posting are just things that interested me visually. I'm not attempting to give an overview or be educational in any way! But perhaps a flavor of the place comes through. We don't have a lot of news; we have been doing a lot of walking in the part of Bologna that is within the old city walls. It is interesting how the atmosphere changes once we get away from the university area: fewer bookshops and tiny food places, more upscale shops and stores. The city is somewhat decorated for Christmas, though I am told that it has been toned down to save energy costs this year. I am posting a bunch of unrelated photos below. Early in our sojourn in Bologna, we got hungry and didn't feel like cooking, so we stopped at Parsit, one of the many small eating places near the university, and near to our apartment. The proprietor is an older Iranian man who speaks acceptable English; he told us that he visited the US in his youth, shortly after the Islamic revolution in Iran. He has lived in Italy for much of his life, but says that he might go back to Iran if it became secular again. We liked him and loved the food from his place and have gone back several times. I post a photo of his menu below.  There are design failures everywhere (I speak as a former engineer). Here is one that I have not encountered in the US. These eggs come in a beautiful, highly designed package, except for one thing. To get an egg out of the container, you can't just grab an egg and lift it out, nope, you have to turn the container upside down and just let one egg come out. It's not very easy to do. Design fail!  Before Covid confined us to the apartment, we did a lot of walking and looking. The architecture here is fascinating, with many different centuries and styles represented. You can find real Medieval buildings here; sometimes it feels as if we have wandered into a movie. The amount of decoration on many of the buildings is also striking, and I like it very much. The absence of decoration on modern buildings seems like a mistake, or a lost opportunity when I look at these buildings. I am going to post some pictures of doorways below. Some of the doorways have interesting shapes, and others have interesting hardware. The door to our building has keyholes in the shape of yawning lions' mouths, for example. Other door hardware: And then there are doorways that are just beautiful or interesting. It's not just the design and the decoration; often the colors are rich but subtle. Not all of these buildings are ancient, by the way. Today we finally felt ready to go out without being a Covid danger to the unsuspecting Bolonese. We wore masks and avoided people and walked through streets in the university area. It was great to get out; I was getting pretty restless being stuck inside. We also had some nice sunshine today after weeks of overcast gloom. The pictures are just fast street shots of buildings, nothing special or terribly interesting, really. I would see the light fall a certain way or fix upon some detail. That's it - perhaps more soon, since our confinement seems to be ending. We visited the Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica on December 8, but shortly thereafter we both came down with Covid and didn't feel much like writing sprightly blog posts. We are now recovering in quarantine and feeling much better. The museum has examples of instruments from various time periods, sheet music, both printed and in manuscript, and portraits of musicians, both composers and performers. We enjoyed all of it. Highlights for me were the portraits of Farinelli, Handel, and Vivaldi, and the music manuscripts. Some of the handwritten sheet music is almost unbelievably fine, small, uniform, and beautiful. It was great to see a page from the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton, some of the earliest music from movable type. In more modern times, Respighi seems to have made some visually beautiful scores. As part of my attempt to learn some Italian, I have been looking for a book to read, and I have decided to try Italo Calvino's book, Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili), a book that I have loved and read many times in English. It is a very poetic book, and probably not such a good choice if the goal is to understand the vernacular Italian of the street. But it is a great pleasure to read the Italian with help from Google Translate; I doubt that I would have learned the word 'cannocchiali" (spyglasses) anywhere else!
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Nancy Rexford
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