Bologna – a city without Starbucks!

Last weekend Karen and I braved the 8 hour train ride and took a short visit down to Bologna Italy. We found Bologna to be an interesting and pleasant little city, with the added advantage of being off the main tourist track. It's full of old architecture, miles of beautiful colonnades and bits of interesting history (i.e. we sat where Dante apparently sat while writing the Divine Comedy).

We ended up in a charming little hotel with helpful staff who hooked us up with an informative city tour on Sunday morning. Before the tour started, we were able to enjoy a bit of Italian piazza life - having a cappuccino in the main Piazza Maggiore. It was a perfect spot for people watching and there were plenty of interesting sights! We were particularly fascinated with a large group of people in Khakis who had set up telescopes and cameras facing the main church, Basilica di San Petronio. At first we assumed that maybe someone famous, like George Clooney, was attending the church - but unless he was trying to sneak in by the rooftops of the piazza, that wasn't it. Every 15 minutes or so, they'd all move and train their binoculars/cameras/telescopes on the roofline of another building. Our second guess was that there were studying the rare brown spotted pigeon - only 11 billion left!

Bologna is the site of the oldest University in Europe and has a bustling student life. On Sunday night, we attended a free concert of authentic Italian Baroque music at an old chapel by the University - or at least, we thought it was just a concert until the guy kept droning on and on and on in Italian about god knows what. It turns out it was a lecture and a concert. Eventually we had to beat a semi-discrete exit - although the bits of music we heard were quite good.
In my few short visits to Italy, I've observed that, in general, the speed at which Italians walk is exactly the reverse of the speed at which they talk! They meander down the columned passageways in huge herds, stopping at every second store window to gesticulate wildly at something and then mosey on a bit further. It can make for very frustrating walking!

Basilica di S Stefano

Piazza Maggiore

Piazza Maggiore

2 leaning towers of...

Basilica di S Stefano...

Colonnade

Basilica di S Stefano...

Basilica di San Petronio