Bologna Letter #6: 25 November 2015

Wes and Marlow
25 November 2015

We are approaching the end of our stay in Bologna. I will say a few things about a few things.

The school. It is housed in a twelfth century palazzo. The bones of the building are, as they say here, monumental. That means a three story building can have an entry area with thirty feet tall ceilings.  On the floor above that, the ceilings are twenty five feet tall. And on the top floor, the ceilings are twelve feet tall. A total of sixty seven feet for a three story building. Monumental. Larger than life. That is typical in Bologna. It is a city of palazzos.

We enter our monumental school building, pass through the huge space created for coaches and horses, then ascend the monumental marble stairs.  At the top we turn left into an enormous corridor hung with twenty foot tall round framed portraits—maybe of the original owners. At the end of the corridor, we turn right and into an area less grand, not grand at all. An area quite carved up into little spaces, some outfitted with the narrowest perilous stairs up to a loft. Our teacher, Marina is outstanding and smart.She speaks very clearly and never a word in English. The school, too, is outstanding, but it's method is a challenge for me which I am confident we can adjust next time. They use work sheets with illustrations of the verbs and nouns we work on. At the end of each day, I struggle to aggregate the illustrations into a tangible body of knowledge. But we have finished our three weeks and we did make progress, especially on the last two days when Marina expressed wonderful sentiments about the necessity, and beauty, of language, of communication skills. From that point we began dwelling on conversation. I felt we began to find our student teacher rhythm. If we return, we will pick up with that conversational approach.

Our neighborhood. We are on the Piazza Santo Stefano. It is an outstanding triangular piazza paved like the piazza in Parma with fist sized round stones pressed into dirt with a sheen of grass in between.On the two long sides are palazzos, semi-monumental. On the short side is the Basilica di Santo Stefano. The basilica would be interesting simply as an attractive collection of buildings.But it is more than that. It began life in the early fifth century when Petronio decided to honor both Santo Stefano, and his own memory of Jerusalem.  He ordered, to be built, a complex of interconnected buildings each one corresponding to a stricture in Jerusalem related to the Jesus story: condemnation, crucifixion, interment and the resurrection.  Historians and archaeologists say Santo Stefano had seven buildings that duplicated seven Jerusalem structures. Now there are only four and they were significantly remodeled and altered nine hundred years ago. No one knows precisely how the original buildings looked.  There are significant churches all over Bologna, on almost every other street, but the Basilica di Santo Stefano has a special aura that shines on the the piazza and we love being there.

Old Bologna, the historic center. From our Piazza Santo Stefano spot it is a twenty minute walk in any direction to one of the twelve gates of the city. The Romans were not the first to settle here, but when they did, two thousand years ago, they built a wall around the city and some of the gates, arches actually, still stand, though they were remodeled eight hundred years ago. Within the circle implied the twelve gates is the historic center of Bologna.  If you slice Bologna in thirds, the center is a tidy rectangular grid. On either side of the rectangle the streets radiate outward diagonally toward the gates. In those areas the streets are a maze of narrow and narrower lanes with twists and turns and dead ends. There are plaques on buildings with notable histories. Copernicus lived there. Rossini lived here. Marconi was born there. Donizetti lived here. Which brings me to coffee.

Coffee does not exist as a large cup you carry down the street. It is tiny. It is piccolo. One ounce. Expresso. Or two ounces of cappuccino. You have it standing at a caffè. The price is posted and varies from one euro to one euro forty cents. You could sit to drink it, but so small a portion would be cold before you reached your seat. There is a caffè bar about every seventy five feet. One's ounce of coffee is consumed early in the morning, late in the morning, early afternoon and in the late afternoon. The tiny amount with it's tiny dose of caffeine has a tiny affect.

The covered sidewalks. The university is nine hundred and thirty years old. It began small. A few students engaged the service of an educated person to help them become educated. It became an institution. As it grew it strained the available housing. Home owners recognized the opportunity to rent space and make money. They built out the second floor of their homes right over the sidewalks. The new rooms stood on posts. Voila, the portico, the covered sidewalk was discovered.Over time they were created intentionally. There are twenty four miles of covered sidewalks today in the historic center of Bologna. On a rainy day you can walk for hours without an umbrella. And on a sunny day you can walk in the shade of the porticoes.

The longest portico. We took a walk to the Santuario della Beata Vergine di San Luca. Saint Luke lived two thousand years ago. It is said, he painted. One of his paintings, a tiny one, of the Madonna's face, arrived nine hundred years ago in Bologna to a hilltop monastery. A shrine was ordered to house it. Construction began. Construction was completed six hundred years later. The tiny madonna painting is installed in a frame, in a niche, on a wall surrounded with a small marble balcony. The wall is awash with baroque gold curlicues with winged silver angels projecting from the wall holding candles. In the center of the wall is the frame. The frame has a large gold crown and is strewn with precious gems and strands of pearls. Just above the pearls is a small hole cut into the frame. Showing through the hole is the tiny madonna face. The church closes for lunch. At that time, two iron doors close over her. To arrive at her shrine we walked two miles entirely under the cover of a portico with near to seven hundred arches. Two miles of portico.The first mile is flat. The second mile is uphill, very uphill. The lane turns this way and that. It is hard to gauge your progress. My delicate thermostat reached it's limit. It was cold. People were bundled. I was, too, at the start. Then came the stripping. First the scarf. Then the jacket. The fleece vest. The shirt. I arrived up top drenched, in a tee shirt, on a frigid day. Wes did not break a sweat. Later, down the hill we had lunch at Trattoria Casa Mia.

About passatelli. We had never heard of it. Casa Mia served it to us. We loved it.  Here is what it is. One egg. Equal parts bread crumbs and parmigiano-reggiano cheese. A scrape of nutmeg. A shave of lemon zest. Mush it together into a lump of dough. If it is too dry add a dab of egg white. Knead it a bit. Wrap it in plastic wrap. Put it to rest for an hour on the counter. When the time is up, grab your potato ricer—if you have a choice of hole size, go with the larger—put the dough in the ricer and push it through. It should come out like thick strands of Playdough. (In fact, you can use a Playdough extruder.) Optimal noodle size is a couple of inches. They are served here two ways. One way is in broth which I do not favor because the bread crumbs develop a soggy aspect. (Plus, you have to have an outstanding broth, which is an extra chore.) If it is not served in brodo (broth), then it is considered served asciutti (dry). Last week, we had dinner in a small restaurant. So small they called it a ristorantino. We had passatelli served in fonduta di parmigiano (melted cheese) with shaved white truffle. I think they consider that dry. I consider it wildly, indescribably, primordially good.

About neighborhood food shopping. Around the corner is a district known for centuries as a market area. A collection of streets housing a collection of specialists. Each store is the best place to go for that particular thing. You want parmegiano-reggiano cheese? Six months old? One year? Two years? Three years old? Do you want to try them?  Go to Amadeo Ceccarelli. Sliced meats? Prosciutto secco, cotto, crudo, San Daniele, culatello? Go to Tamburini. Fruits and vegetables? There are four open air vendors. Each has occupied their site for about one hundred years. The name of their job has a nice ring, fruttivendolo.And there is Atti, who for more than one hundred years has made, continues to make, fresh daily, dozens of different stuffed and not stuffed pastas.Tortellini, tortelloni, tagliatelle, gnocchi of potato or gnocchi of zucca (sweet squash) and passatelli. The quality is the highest possible. I forgot to mention gelato. It is everywhere in town. Each shop I try becomes my new favorite. First it was salted sicilian pistachio. Then it was toasted pine nut. Then chestnut. Then almond granita. This week Wes indulged in a torta di gelato, an ice cream cake. The bottom layer was pistachio. Atop that was nocciola, hazelnut. Pressed into the side were chopped pistachios.On half of the top was an arrangement, a still life, of red currants, raspberries and yellow gooseberries win their delicate leaves sugared and splayed outward.

These are the things that have occupied our days these past three weeks. And Wes has made them all possible.I might have dreamed of Bologna. I might have dreamed of wandering on old European streets. I might have dreamed of speaking Italian. He did more than dream. He set the wheels in motion. He brought the dream to life.We once had a guide in Rome. She said, "we understand what we know. The more we know, the more we understand." That has been the focus of our month. Ciao from Bologna.

Wes and Marlow
25 November 2015
Bologna