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I am looking forward to being in my study in Italy again, looking out that window, making coffee, and playing our new-ish digital piano. When I play with headphones, nobody can hear my mistakes!
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I am posting two pictures today. The first is the desk that I work at, with afternoon sunlight streaming in through the large window.  The second is a view from the steps that lead up to the Sala Borsa Library entrance in Piazza Maggiore. Bologna is a city full of interesting things to look at. This is just a sample.  The Fiera is a sprawling collection of rather forbiddingly modernist buildings in the San Donato neighborhood of Bologna. The local opera company is using a theater in the Fiera while the opera house in Piazza Verdi is being renovated. The Fiera is not far from our apartment, an easy walk. There is a yearly art fair called Arte Fiera which draws large crowds, according to my eyeballs. I went to it in 2022 and enjoyed it very much. Galleries, mostly from northern Italy, bring artworks to sell. This year there were two very large galleries, one devoted mainly to 'contemporary art,' and the other with mostly 'modernist' (older or more established) art. I go to Arte Fiera for two reasons: 1) to discover artists that I like and have never seen before, and 2) to try to figure out why the other people are there. This year I did much better with 1). To work on 2) I needed to talk to people, and yesterday I felt like looking, not talking. But I kept wondering, as I looked at monochrome paintings, cold mathematical abstractions, paintings that looked slapped together without care or skill: "why do dealers think that people will buy this stuff?" I might not mind walking by it in a museum, but I wouldn't want to live with it. I will post a few pictures of artworks that I liked below. First, the painting that I liked the best, by Johanna Mirabel.  Next, pictures by Tomaso Binga (left) and Oxana Tregubova (right). I think they will expand if you click on them. Two photos by Beth Moon.. Some paintings by Marta Roberti. These are large works on paper or parchment, and they look as if they could have been ancient Egyptian woodcuts. I will mention a few other artists that I liked. Carla Accardi (idiosyncratic abstractions) and Mirko Marchelli (decorative motifs on decaying plaster) are familiar to me and I enjoyed their offerings this year, too. Also new to me were Diango Hernandez (distorted figuration), Odochimeg Davaadorj (Mongolian symbolic watercolors of women), and Martina Steckholzer (bird and animal paintings).
This is Nancy picking up the blog today. We have now been in Bologna for a week and a half and are beginning to feel settled. It’s been cold and damp here, and very gray. In fact, there has been so little sunshine since we arrived that our body clocks have remained stubbornly stuck in Massachusetts, and sleeping has been far more interrupted than we experienced in our earlier travels. But this has improved a bit the last few days. Our apartment is chilly by American standards. The furnace that serves the entire building is turned off from 11PM to 6AM. This is not a problem since the winters here are less severe than in Massachusetts. But when the outdoor daytime temperatures were in the 30s the week we arrived, the indoor temperature only reached 62, which feels cold if you are just sitting, so I have learned to appreciate long underwear. We also indulged in a few small new comforts:
We are doing pretty well with goal #1. We have walked into the center of town nearly every day, which is a minimum of 3 miles round-trip, and we have seen many of our friends here and made plans to see the rest. We cook simple meals with fresh vegetables and very little meat.  This was the display of winter vegetables that greeted us when we entered our local grocery store (Coop, via Repubblica) the other day. We bought the big green cabbage. We took the big first step toward goal #2 by buying a digital piano, which came on Tuesday. It has a nice touch and good headphones so we can play at any time of the day or night. I have organized my manuscripts and am eager to start reviewing and editing.  The new piano is in the living area (which is also the kitchen). The tiny new space heater is also visible at the bottom. Goal #3, speaking Italian is problematic. Most of our Italian friends speak English, and my Italian is so SLOW that using it makes conversation boring and unnatural. So I am now looking into other ways to improve without depending on meetings with friends. We haven’t yet begun to plan side trips (goal #4) but there is time for that as the weather gets warmer. For the time being we are enjoying discovering interesting new corners in Bologna, like this little restaurant, hidden off a back street, whose portico dates from the 1300s.  Bologna is known as the "red city" because so many of its buildings were made of brick rather than stone. I found it surprising at first to see pointed gothic arches carried out in brick and to realize that they were really 600 years old, not Victorian imitations.   We arrived in the Bologna airport on January 13 after a rather easy set of flights. We took the monorail to the central bus station and walked about a mile to our apartment in San Donato. On the way there we saw about 20 green parrots with long tails clustered in a couple of trees, something we certainly were not expecting. Since then, we have done some shopping, met a few of our friends, tilted at the bureaucratic windmill without much success, and tried to keep warm, which is not so easy. Our apartment is always chilly, and the building turns off the heat entirely between 11:00 PM and 6:00 AM. We both are still suffering from jet lag, insomnia, and fatigue, and this may explain why this post is rather overdue. I include two pictures of the view out my window. Nancy may have pictures of the parrots, but she is napping right now. Anyway, we are enjoying Bologna, taking long walks among the portici and seeing our friends. Cheers! Two unrelated pictures that perhaps don't say much about Bologna, but do say something about Bologna's effect on me. I was walling back to San Donato from my Italian class in the city center, and I sat down in a park near our apartment. It was cool there, and the day was hot. A tiny flower landed on my arm, and I took a photo of it. The other picture was yesterday on our terrace in the evening. The strong sunlight passing through our wine glasses colored the table in an interesting way. We kept the wine glasses when the apartment was emptied out because we liked their rather dramatic design. That's all, nothing profound, just good, ordinary things. Ok, so maybe you aren't impressed by walls. This wall abuts a garden that is not usually open to the public, but the day we saw it was special, and friends gave us passes so that we could go in and see a number of private gardens. It's a big wall!  A few weeks ago we saw this window, I can't remember where.  I have been walking into the city center from San Donato every day for Italian classes which begin at 9:30 AM. I usually walk down Via Zamboni and through Piazza Verdi. I see the bell tower just as I reach the piazza, and it reminds me of how we loved the bells when we lived nearby in 2022.  As I mentioned in my last post, I was impressed by the Van Eyck piece for solo recorder. So, as one does in Bologna, I walked into the Ut Orpheus music shop today and asked whether the sheet music might be available. Ut Orpheus has a very strong selection of "early music," and they have the entire 143 pieces of van Eyck solo recorder music in three volumes. I bought volume 1, which has the piece "Amarilli mia Bella," based on the famous (at least to singers) aria of that name by Caccini.
Here's the thing: Jacob van Eyck (died in 1657) was a "chime master," an organist, and a flute player. He was also blind, and someone else wrote down the 143 pieces as he played them, or improvised them. van Eyck must have had quite a memory, and his scribe must have been pretty skillful, too. The 1984 edition of "Der Fluyten Lust-hof" by Amadeus Verlag has a lot of wonderful notes and song texts, since a lot of the pieces are based on popular songs. It's a treasure trove of lively tunes, some psalms, and a few fantasias. |
Nancy Rexford
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