Bologna

Hellooooo, I fell off the planet for a bit there. Longer than I expected or planned, in part because my "sometimes music is nice" post didn't upload properly as I sped into Switzerland. Yeah, well, you design a world-wide web and see how it works.

But we're still playing catchup and the good news is, this post pulls us up an entire [kinda hazy, honestly a little blurry] month, because Bologna was mid-June to mid-July and boy howdy let me tell you it was stupidly hot and slightly overly busy. After the jump: what kind of creep complains about how busy he was while getting work done in Bologna, Italy! Especially when he starts describing the rest of the month and realizes he actually had an incredibly lucky time of it all! Wow! Gratitude practice much??

A blurry view of Bologna from Patrick King on Vimeo.

Bologna's fame rests mostly on its university and its food scene, and neither is made-up! My surprisingly expansive flat was located on a stretch near a cluster of university buildings, as well as the Teatro Comunale, whose piazza is a major congregating space for students. (I was also just around the corner from Pizza Casa, whose dirt-cheap and totally-solid pizzas are eaten on perches extending a few blocks in all directions, which also may have led to a heightened awareness of student culture.) That means a nightly party in the streets - as I said in my last post, Italy is not an earbud city, so you get lots of undergrads howl-singing pop tunes at 2 AM, and particularly being there at the end of the year means a lot of celebration. (This is an area where graduating students literally receive their laurels, meaning that if you see someone wearing a wreath of leaves on their head, they've graduated - or possibly defended a thesis, it's not entirely clear to me, but was a constant feature in the later stretch of this stay.)

For me, this stretch of the trip was a bit more focused on work; having been hired last year five days before the semester, I was largely setting up lesson plans and assessments days in advance, and the grand goal of this summer, fragmented into a million pieces, was to return to campus with my semesters mapped out, and at least a solid outline of lesson plans and assessments and rubrics ready to go. Bologna also played host to the trickier business of show selection - something that in coming years I'm relieved will be a process of collaboration, as I don't particularly thrive on solo decisionmaking, particularly as I'm still figuring out a lot of the landscape of my program. Between all of that and a much-needed budget correction, I really leaned into the "what if I just lived here but had a regular life" thought experiment these trips can offer.

Surprisingly for such a student-y city, Bologna's a little light on street art (though I found its corners, as the video above demonstrates). A lot of political graffiti, as you'd expect, but most street art was concentrated in one or two neighborhoods in the city. Why? I WILL NEVER KNOW, please don't yell at me.

 

And it was: a good experiment! I've mentioned before that I lose weight every summer that I spend time in Italy, and Bologna was a good reminder of why: shopping for groceries every couple of days in a place where the assumption is you only need a handful of this or a small basket of that, cooking simple 3-4 ingredient dishes comprising ingredients at peak seasonal flavor, and indulging in regular but miniature treats (gelato, mostly) leaves you feeling constantly indulgent even as your budget and waistline come under control. Walking everywhere - at least an hour or two a day, and more like 4-5 hours at least on days that I took off of school work - rounds out the whole picture, but in general if you drop me in a walkable old Italian city with little to-the-purpose shops offering me cheese or squash blossoms or whatnot, I'm gonna walk out happy.

This is the latest in the summer that I've been in Italy, and there were drawbacks. First, my idiotic "I'll start south and head north" plan, which has worked in years past, only really does the trick if you move past the Alps. (It also works better when humans haven't kept accelerating a climate catastrophe that continues to wreak havoc across the globe but oh well about that.) Turns out, heading north to Bologna just meant that instead of picking up a 10 degree cooling breeze from the sea, I was in a valley that baked itself piping hot for most of the month that I was there. More a disappointment, though (as I can usually survive heat waves these days with cool water and acceptance that my brain doesn't work properly), was the realization that while August is the month where Italy shuts down and runs to the coast, July quietly starts the process, and what you first miss are the craft and antique/flea markets. I'm in love with these jumbled, sometimes magical spots, and while I think you may have more of them to begin with in e.g. Florence (whose artisanal workshops are a really spectacularly ideal "I need a break from working" wander that I didn't quite match in Bologna) it does seem like you'd want to come earlier in the summer if you want to catch them.

Of course, there was a lot of glory on hand here too.  Late in the stay, I found a farmer's market whose weekly offerings all come from within 20 kilometers of the city. There are covered walkways into the hills surrounding the city, and an impressive cemetery full of genuinely interesting statuary. And there's culture. As a Ravenna native who now lives in Bologna told me, July is the quiet season for culture, but in Bologna there's so much to begin with that even the quiet season is busy. It's true! I missed out on far more than I saw, with a mix of music programs, dance, and (very little) theatre and opera unfolding during my stay. But where I really cleaned up, unexpectedly, was in film.

No really I loved this cemetery.

Bologna is the home of the Cineteca Bologna, a film archive whose work is essential in the ecosystem of film restoration; they've done work on Martin Scorsese's World Cinema project, facilitated restorations and preservations of films from the earliest Lumiere shorts to films from the 80s and 90s. And while I knew when I came to town that they were producing an annual outdoor series of films in the main piazza (a not uncommon kind of thing in Italian cities), what I didn't know was that this was just a part of a wider, long-running festival of restored films: Il Cinema Ritrovato.

The festival, kicking off about halfway through my stay, coincided with about a weeklong heat wave that launched temperatures past 100, and I figured it might be a nice place to get some air conditioning. I took the plunge to get a festival pass, and was off to the races: silent shorts from 1904, some mundane and others utterly transporting; Buster Keaton shorts from the 20s; German musical comedies from the 1930s, some of the last bits of fun before the Nazis (who loathed them) shut it all down; cult films from Walter Hill getting a polish; Andrei Tarkovsky's gradually-earthshattering Nostalghia (Mirror is still my hands-down favorite of his, but this was a very special screening). And that's not counting the outdoor screenings, which included a particularly timely Last Picture Show introduced by Wes Anderson on July 4th, its study of America's bitter, shortsighted and resentful character never more timely; a gloriously laughter-and-applause-filled Singin' in the Rain screening, The Last Waltz, live orchestral accompaniments to Nosferatu and Foolish Wives... This was all magnificent, surpassed only by the weird and ecstatic delight of a multinational festival full of enthusiasts who all shared a common passion for film. I hadn't planned on being here, but I loved it so thoroughly that I'm tempted to return... some year.

You know what's cool, is seeing a huge square (mostly to the left of this shot at its periphery) filled with hundreds to over a thousand people all shown up to see a film. Italian community vibes are some of the most joyful ones I know??

I visited Ravenna on a day trip (that video will come in the next week or so) but this was very much not a touristy stop on this trip, which I am quite okay with! I didn't even eat out that much, which may be the one "ah, too bad" of it all (though I was still so spoiled by southern Italian pricing that everything seemed quite spendy). It is, in truth, an extravagantly delicious town for food, most of it the kind of fatty/carb-y food we think of as quintessentially "Italian," and I am fairly certain that if I was here long-term I would see a total breakdown in my "but I lose weight in Italy!" narrative. Still, at a normal-human pace of only eating out once a week or so, it's ideal, and it's jam-packed with quality salumeria and bakeries and cheese shops to keep home-dining a pleasure filled with little treats. I should specifically shout out the gelateria Cremeria Santo Stefano, which I think won some accolade while I was there, because the lines suddenly exploded - but it's well deserved, with their pistachio gelato in particular literally the best gelato I have had in my life, anywhere, any flavor. It was good enough that I revisited often enough to make sure I tried every single flavor they had. (Chinotto is the only one I wouldn't try again; it's bitter orange, just as it advertises, so if that's your jam, have at it all!)

So as I say: not the most focused nor the most mindful "ah, the million little things I've noticed!" leg of the trip, and indeed, up until my current spot in Scotland, I stayed pretty scattered for a while. My mind is coming back now (is it a coincidence that it's been under 80 for days at a time? hard 2 say) and so there are some more stories to weave into this narrative as I get us caught up, but let's call this Good Enough For Now, Then! Next up: probably some odds and ends, and maybe a discussion of Milan!

No but as I say the cemetery though.