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!
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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!
Yesterday we went to see the city art collection, which is mostly artworks produced in Bologna, mostly by Bolognese artists. It is a large collection ranging in time from the 13th through the 19th centuries, and most of it is quite competent. But by the time we got about a quarter of the way through it, we began to feel tired of all of the crucified Christs, Madonnas-with-child paintings, saints, and mythic scenes. So much of the work seemed complacent and academic. I am aware that this is not fair to the artists or the art; we were perhaps not ideal observers yesterday. But I was wishing to see something else: Paul Klee (for fantasy) or Agnes Martin (for different kind of religious feeling). There were quite a number of interesting portraits; I think we enjoyed those most of all. The collection is housed in the upper floor of a palace formerly occupied by the Papal legate (a bishop) who was also the governor of Bologna. The high ceilings are elaborately painted; I noticed that the bishop could have gazed up from his bed at a mostly nude Psyche (with Cupid?) or possibly Venus (with Adonis?) on the ceiling as he went to sleep. Speaking of nudity, I noticed that the ancient Greeks most often show naked men and clothed women. In a lot of later art, this is reversed. How about that? On the way home, we heard a lot of shouting and thought 'what, another protest?' But this was a group of young men (all fully clothed) having fun. One of them was wearing a white robe (it looked more like a large white sack) and a laurel wreath on his head. We think was an example of the custom of hazing a student who had just become a 'dottore.' Since this incident we have seen many more students with laurel crowns surrounded by raucous groups of their friends - I guess it's that time of year. As we walk along Strada Maggiore on the way to the museum, we see a small, older man in a stocking cap walk in front of us, in a hurry. He is carrying a blue and white rectangular athletic bag with a shoulder strap. We see him drop the bag with a thud into a recessed window well of one of the shops. He then hurried off. Thinking his behavior suspicious, we circled back to see if anyone would pick up the bag. No. At this point we became concerned: was it a bomb? Why would a person do what he did? We hurried on to a city office in Piazza Maggiore. The woman behind the counter directed us to the police, who almost always are present near the Neptune statue. There are three young guys in uniform there, and between our broken Italian and their broken English, we make it clear to them what happened and why we are concerned. They are not very concerned. “Italy is safe,” they say, knowing that we are from the very hazardous United States. But a bit later we see them strolling toward the place that we described. We heard no explosions later, so I guess we were overly nervous.
Collezioni Comunali d'Arte Fortified by cappuccinos and half of a sandwich, we decided to go to the next museum on our list (in chronological order: yes, we do plan these things). As usual, there was too much to see and attend to in one visit, so we probably will go back. I had fun whistling some music from their collection of large illuminated manuscripts, and I really enjoyed the variety of faces and expressions on the sculptures. There were very few actual paintings, but many bas-reliefs. I have the feeling that this museum has more of an art-museum point of view than a historical point of view. A lot of their things are visually marvelous; for example, their room full of early guns concentrates on the most onately decorated specimens. Yesterday (Sunday) we walked south from our apartment to a large park just outside the old city walls, Giardini Margherita. It was overcast but not chilly. I don't have a lot to say about the park; it has a small restaurant, lots of trees and grassy areas, and an equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel II. There are park benches with people reading, and we saw some young families walking, and people walking their dogs. Sometimes just being a park is enough! I recuperated well enough to go to a concert in the evening (of December 1): Ensemble Zipangu, named after the piece by Claude Vivier which was also on the program. The string players are a sub-group of the orchestra of the local opera house, and they gave a thrilling performance of four excellent pieces by Peter Sculthorpe (Sonata 3 for strings), Tan Dun (Concerto for gu-zeng and strings), George Lenz (Birrung) and Claude Vivier (Zipangu). All of this music was substantial, accessible, often exciting, and really the kind of stuff that I like best. The Vivier piece was a fitting conclusion to the concert; strange, searching music, full of drama and beauty. I'm so glad that I dragged myself out of the house for this!
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Nancy Rexford
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