Reggio and Beyond

Well, that took a minute. Turns out, Venice is astonishing and I basically could not do anything except explore that city the entire time I was there. I'm up in Munich now, which is lovely in its own right, and catching up on my dissertation and this here bag of words. So, backtracking a bit to catch up on things.

Side note: the train ride from Venice to Munich is stunning. About six hours long, winding through the mountains, small Alpine villages, mist and forests, it's just jawdropping and glorious and if I wasn't heatstricken and exhausted from my Venetian exploring, I would have tried to capture it somehow, but as it is I just gaped out the window and occasionally drifted in and out of sleep.

Jumping back a week... Reggio Emilia and its neighbors, after the jump.

Reggio Emilia on market day.

The thing is: when temperatures get to be upwards of 90° F, I fall apart completely. Mentally, physically, emotionally. I get irritable, unfocused... the whole nine yards. And it was solidly in the 90s pretty much my entire week in Emilia Romagna. So that colored my experience a little bit. I spent a good deal of time getting my dissertation research organized and mapping out my next steps as I start sorting through everything I grabbed in Vienna. (I should have been able to predict this, but obviously Italy was not conducive to getting a lot of reading and writing done.)


That said, I got some good exploring in. A day shared between Modena and Bologna - the former a fairly upmarket town, the homeplace of balsamic vinegar, and perhaps my favorite town in the region in balancing small-town scale and pace of life with just enough energy and activity to feel lively; the latter a college town that brought back a little of the business and human tumble of Florence and Rome. I spent a half day in Parma, which... I liked? To be honest, my least favorite of the three - it felt the least alive to me, although surely the blazing heat had something to do with that. But I'm glad to have seen it!

The food market in Modena! This place was awesome on many, many levels, and if I were to do the trip again, would probably be my home base in Emilia Romagna.

Modena also had (hands down) the best street art of the three major cities of the region. This little nook was typical - colorful, varying styles, pleasant and bright. SIDE NOTE: Have I mentioned that Italy is THE BEST COUNTRY EVER for public water availability? This is true.

An arcade in Bologna. Arcades are the best and most magical things ever and the only reason we do not have them in America is that our urban developers have always hated the American public and want us all to get sunburned and heatstricken and die on the sidewalks with parched lips and dried-out pores.

But my home base was Reggio Emilia, a great little town that's not especially on the tourist trail (with the caveat that just about every place in Italy is on the tourist trail to some degree). While its neighbors are mostly significant for food-related reasons (Parma ham, Parmigiano Reggiano, balsamic vinegar, and Bologna as the Fat One with all the Amazing Traditional Restaurants), Reggio Emilia is mostly known as the birthplace of the Italian flag. There's a museum for that.

But really, it's the place I visited in Italy that felt most like it operated on its own rhythms and to its own purposes. There was a strong sense of community - most people seemed to know each other, and (at least non-Italian) tourists were very much the exception rather than the rule. This was both charming and a little challenging - unlike my Parisian trip some five years ago, I hadn't had the time to devote a few months to language skills for this trip, and so while I had the basic pleasantries and tourist-interaction phrases down, it was hard to open doors without a real ability to banter or chit-chat.

Which is not to say the people were unfriendly. In fact, the city seemed to have festivals of some variety every other night, and the passagiatta - the evening stroll after dinner - was as lively and expansive as any I'd seen in Italy. There was a large student population, most evident at night in the piazzas, which gave the place a real thrumming energy.

And yet - I often felt a little isolated, a little unable to bridge that gap. Now that I'm back in a German-speaking country, it's much improved - but it's certainly whetted my appetite for more language acquisition. Almost the entire reason I travel is because I want to get behind the scenes in any given culture, and one thing that my week in Emilia Romagna demonstrated was how useful language skills are in slipping around those corners.

The prettiest of the several festivals in town was the all-in-white dinner party in the city centre, where families and groups of friends set up picnics in the street in an all-white setting, many employing Alice in Wonderland themes to their decorations or dish names. I was able to wander through on my way to a performance of True West - particularly fascinating in Italian! - and it was just the loveliest thing.

Fading poetry on the sidewalk in Reggio Emilia