Our first planned activity of the day was a 2-hour walking tour. Rather than going through AirBnB Experiences for this (which Tim botched earlier), we had simply reserved a couple of spots on a tour conducted by the local tourism office. The tour wound up being a solid 10 minutes of worthwhile information crammed into two hours. There were 14 people in the group, and only 4 who needed the English version (and the other two besides us were actually a Spanish couple, so they could half-follow the Italian…and there was no Spanish option). So, the tour was “multi-lingual,” meaning the guide spoke (through her face mask, although we were outside for most of it…and into a cheap microphone that went into even cheaper earpieces for us) in Italian for a while at each stop and then repeated what she’d said in English…except the English was generally about half as long, so we knew were missing a lot of content that the Italians were getting. It turned out, both Benton and I were considering just cutting our losses and walking back to the tourism office and turning in our headsets. But, we stuck with it, as it wasn’t like we had a slew of other things to do.
After the tour, we returned to the flat so Tim could hang up the laundry he’d run, and then we returned to Basilica di San Petronio just before 1:19 PM. One of the few notable things we had picked up on the tour was that, at 1:19 PM, the sun coming through a small hole in the ceiling of the basilica would cause a circle of light to crass a meridian line that was inlaid diagonally in the floor. And…that is exactly what happened (we’re a little unclear as to why it was 1:19 rather than noon or 1:00…but it was pretty cool to actually watch the circle move and hit dead center as our digital timepieces had been sitting on 1:19 for a bit; that’s precision planning from 1655, apparently).
We grabbed lunch and then stopped in the Museo Civico Archeologico, which had an extensive and impressive collection in the basement of…Egyptian artifacts, which had nothing to do with Bologna except for the fact that the museum had coming into the possession of an extensive collection of Egyptian artifacts. There was also one placard that talked about the spread of Christianity in some part of Egypt in 100 BC, which seemed like a real head-scratcher.
The rest of the museum was more Bologna-centric, but it was a real mish-mash of what displays had English translations and which ones did not, and the overall layout didn’t really draw us in to feeling like we were getting a good sense of the evolution of the city, so we didn’t linger too much. That museum did reinforce something we thought we’d gotten from the guide in the morning: that the area had been continuously populated for several thousand years—slowly evolving from a collection of settlements into a single one that became what the city is today.
We ducked our heads into the Sanctuary of Santa Maria della Vita on our way back to the flat to take a load off for ~45 minutes before heading back out to meet up with Fosca Fimiani, a Bologna-area-born-and-raised local who Tim knew through the analytics world. That became: drinks/meat/cheeses -> a quick cup of coffee (espresso standing at the counter of a cafe) -> gelato -> a walk to and through a large park at the southeast of the old city -> back to the city center. We were then sent on our way with a dictate to find a dinner spot and eat on Via del Patrello, which our AirBnB host had mentioned as being the “hipster” area, and Fosca, too, confirmed and recommended. We stopped back by the apartment briefly…and then followed instructions! It was a pretty cool street, and we found a cool place to have a couple of drinks and a light dinner.
We finished up in time to head back to Piazza Maggiore in time for the start of the 9:30 outdoor movie: *Dr. Strangelove. *That was shown with English audio and Italian subtitles, but we were just standing behind the (full) seats, as we hadn’t really intended to stay for the whole movie. And we didn’t. We watched the (lengthy) preamble by the host (in Italian) and then the first 15-20 minutes of the movie itself before heading back to the flat for the evening—somehow, a day where we didn’t actively traverse any great distances with a destination in mind, but we still managed to clock 25,000+ steps each and had a lot of time just standing on hard surfaces (the walking tour and the archaeological museum), so we were ready to…sit.
An interesting/memorable experience of the day:
Benton: Validation from Fosca: getting seated is not simple (“it depends”), paying is not simple (“it depends”), having a fixed plan for food and drink is…going to fail (we went to several of Fosca’s favorite places…some of which she had confirmed online were open…only to find them locked down and closed because August is the holiday month).
Tim: The fact that the Basilica di San Petronio was never finished—the facade is only finished up to maybe 15’, and, inside, many of the chapels and much of the ceiling is just plain and unadorned. The guide commented that they (Bolognans? Italians?) are “simpler” and not as over-the-top with their decorations (“like the French”). This rang a little hollow, as the “simple” areas were the areas that had never been completed. The finished areas (both in the basilica and elsewhere) were just as elaborate as what we’d seen in France! One of the finished chapels in the basilica was a ceiling-high mural depicting Dante’s view of the world (simplified? Only 3 levels), which included a depiction of the prophet Mohammad in hell. The guide noted that the artist didn’t want any ambiguity here, as he had actually labeled that figure “Mohammad.” Unsurprisingly, Muslims are not fans of that depictions, and there have been several plots over the years to do harm to the basilica. As a result, there are armed guards stationed at the entrance the basilica. Our tour was also the day after Salmon Rushdie was stabbed, and, to her credit, the guide made a pretty tactful comment about that and linked it to the mural (she noted that they wanted to keep the mural because of what it represented historically, but that “they” believed in religious tolerance—basically, throwing a little shade on the mural itself while lightly condemning the attack on Rushdie).
