I know, I know: what ever happened to our strategy of starting in the south, where it’s warm, and slowly moving our way northward?  Well, I guess it’s the first time in our lives there’s nowhere we have to be and no reason not to go on a whim.  So we hopped a surprisingly short and easy flight to the opposite end of Italy – the north central region, with Venice to the east and Turin to the west.  To our delight, the weather here in Bologna is warm and sunny – really not a bit colder than Sicily – you need a jacket at night but you can sit comfortably at an outdoor café during the day.  We have all the windows open in our lovely apartment, which we rented for a week because we couldn’t find a single hotel room that we could afford.  It’s graduation week here, the home of Europe’s oldest university, and the streets are filled with students, some wearing laurel wreaths on their heads to celebrate their achievements.  A Moroccan-sounding band with saxophones and tambourines is marching by my window as I write.  Our apartment is enormous, a 3-bedroom, 2-bath, antique-filled flat on the second floor of a 1940s building right on the main street.  The building has the feel of something a bit older, with the high ceilings and large rooms of the turn of the century, but the owners, who are very sweet and speak pretty good English and live right across the street, say it was built right after World War II.  The kitchen and bathrooms haven’t been updated a great deal since then, but for half the price of a tiny hotel room (if there were one to be had), it’s worth it!  You can see our place here. 

Bologna’s distinguishing feature seems to be its archways: all the streets are lined with arch-covered, terrazzo-tiled sidewalks, smooth and wide with a minimum of dog feces and no cars or motorcycles trying to mow you down.  On the ground level are stores and restaurants, broken every 50 yards or so by a pair of huge but nondescript and entirely unmarked doors, which if you have the key lead to marvelous apartment buildings like ours.  None of the open courtyards we’ve seen in other cities – Bologna’s secrets are locked away behind security doors.

Although somewhat more livable than Sicily, in terms of the availability of goods and services, Bologna doesn’t have nearly the history: what there is goes back only (!) to the medieval period.  Yesterday we toured a palace from the 1700s, climbed 500 steps in a watch tower from the 1300s, and visited the city’s main cathedral, which was enormous but didn’t compare to the splendor of the churches in Palermo.  Most of what is left to see are museums and churches, which we’ll make our way through at a more leisurely pace, along with day trips to nearby cities such as Parma and Ravenna.