Bologna

On our final full day in Italy, we had a bit of a rest in the morning, with no engagements. A chance to catch our breath, before heading to Bologna for a tour of the city, followed by an early dinner and the final opera of our tour, Tosca.

In the morning we had a final wander around Reggio Emilia, a coffee in the café outside our hotel, and then boarded the bus for Bologna. There we met our guide, Julia, who told us all about Bologna. The city doesn’t have quite the same cachet as some of the other cities that we’ve been to on our tour, but still there were some interesting points. It’s another city with an ancient university – this one reckoned to be the oldest in the Western world, having started in 1088. Some of it was damaged during WW2, but has been reconstructed as much as possible. Where the frescoes were unrecoverable they’ve simply painted white, not wanting to create a “fake antique” look. There was an anatomical theatre, where demonstrations of dissections were carried out, watched over by statues of Anatomia and all the forefathers of medicine – Galenus, Hipoocrates etc.

 

The new library, on the site of the old library

The really old library

The tour was then interrupted when one of our number was knocked down by an unheeding cyclist. She sped off into the distance, leaving Mike on the cobbled street. Fortunately one of the bystanders was a doctor, and within short order he was off to hospital for an x-ray. He turns out to have a broken hip, so not a good end of the holiday for him. This necessarily cast a downer on the rest of the day’s proceedings as people wanted updates on how he was doing. I managed to get a picture of the perpetrator speeding away, so hopefully the police can use that to help identify and bring her to justice.

We then had a look inside the big church – not the cathedral, that’s elsewhere – and it’s full of big church things. It’s one of the largest churches by volume in the world due to its 45m height. But it also contains science, in the form of a meridian line, which is lit by the sun through a tiny hole in the roof at local noon.  

Inside the big church

After a bit of free time – we found a café and I had a Negroni – we met up again for an early dinner; yet another plate of antipasto followed by tortellini. Not having had anything to eat since breakfast, we fell upon this like the wolf on the fold.

After dinner we quick-marched to our bus again, as we were running a little behind schedule. This was exacerbated by the bus driver taking a wrong turn, and also the fact that Kelly had gone straight to the venue from the hospital – she’s our main Italian speaker among the guides, and the driver didn’t have much English. We made it through with a minute to spare, and Kelly greeted us, handed us all tickets willy-nilly, and we sat down straight away.

The opera, Tosca, was well executed but no particular new settings or surprises. Scarpia was particularly loathsome. Spoiler alert: she dies at the end.