Tuscany: 4-21 Bologna

I think I ended the description of April 20 with some mild complaining about our hotel in Bologna. Allow me to expound.

Green Park Hotel conjures ... well, a green park, for one thing. Maybe something classy like Park Avenue. What it doesn’t say is “businessman’s hotel in the suburbs, conveniently located to the airport and various industries.” Apparently, Bologna hosts a lot of conventions, and we arrived at the tail end of a leather-good tradeshow. And the Green Park hotel wasn’t just on the outskirts of Bologna; it was on the outskirts of the tradeshow. I have this image of the Leather Movers and Shakers sitting at the historic hotels downtown, eating in five-star restaurants, making important deals with important people. The crowd at the Green Park was strictly overflow: the nervous dudes in cheap suits drinking with each other at the small bar in the mainly-empty lobby, making last-minute changes on their PowerPoint shows, with their laptops on glass coffee tables next to fake palm trees, munching on salty-crunchies from the bar and occasionally going outside to smoke. They were clustered in small groups, listening to Arab music on jam boxes, talking on cell phones and going to meetings in drab rooms with green tablecloths and erasable-marker easals.

We were in the hotel, presumably, because the rest of the city was booked, and because it was close to the airport, and we had a 6:15 a.m. flight on Sunday. But nothing about the hotel was smooth or elegant – and yes, we were spolied by our earlier, luxurious, right-in-the-middle-of-town digs. With this place, it seemed everything was a hassle. Our rooms were in the motel annex out back. The keys confounded us constantly. The stairs within our rooms were dangerous semi-spirals. It was half a mile, it seemed, from our rooms to the restaurant, where the food was mediocre and the staff, while sincere and pleasant, was slow and possessed little English. I could get my computer online wirelessly to do emails – but not to surf the Web. The rooms were warm, but they didn’t have the AC turned on yet. It was just this kind of thing, over and over. The bartender was nice, though, and told us a funny story about 300 Englishmen staying in the hotel during a tug-of-war convention(!) and, he swears, emptying the bar of everything but water.

Anyway, it wasn’t the same Romantic Italy we had gotten used to; it’s also true that by the time we arrived Thursday night, after all the driving hassles, we didn’t care one bit. Friday we decided to head into Bologna, which by all accounts is a charming university town with the usual medieval core – and yes, that was another jaded remark. I think what happens is we see a few medieval cores and we are charmed. Then we see some more and think, right, medieval core, piazza, 14th-Century church, got it. I think there’s another stage, the one where you calm your mind down enough to relax into the lifestyle and see, all over again, the charm and unique qualities of each town, and remember the gift that an hour at a cafe in a medieval square actually is. I do believe that such a transformation exists, and I know that we didn’t make it in Bologna.

We drove into town and parked in a garage that sat next to a very crowded street market – though it’s not the market you’re probably thinking of. It’s a little more bargain-hunting flea-market type thing than anything charming. We headed for the main square – the usual plan – and found ourselves in a dizzying parade of pedestrians, many of them young and energetic, all of them shopping, and few of them appearing to be tourists. Bologna is a happening place, with lots of students from a 1,000-year-old univeristy which, I think, is the oldest in Europe. The town is known for its covered sidewalks, or arcades, of which there’s something like 30 miles in town. They are long and wide and covered with high arches, and they go back hundreds of years. It makes for a pleasant walking experience, and there were lots of people out taking advantage. It had a completely different feel from the other places we were in: more cell phones, far fewer tourists, and more modern shopping with a complete dearth of souvenir shops.

Ultimately, there wasn’t much that we wanted to see, really. We were also tired, part of the ebb-and-flow of travel energies, so we wouldn’t have been too “into” any place. But there was a lot of walking, which wears us out, and the church we were headed for was closed when we got there, and the two towers that the city is known for weren’t terribly interesting, and they were in the middle of a very busy intersection, and the stateue of Neptune was neat but also crowded. We had sandwiches in a nice square, then discovered some nice shopping in little side streets that date back to Roman times, then we checked out some recommended restaurants from the book and found out they were booked. So we made our way back towards the main square, where the cathedral was closed for renovations, and about this time I started thinking, “It’s 1:30, and nobody serves dinner until 7:30, and this town is kind of dull and crowded – what are we gonna do here for six hours?” I was wondering exactly how to say this when Dad piped up and said, basically, “Let’s go back to the hotel and relax,” and Mom said cool, and that was that. We were all thinking the same thing, and we all decided at once to bail.

First, of course, we had to get gelato. Then we briefly sampled the market, since I was still looking for a gift or two, but it became unpleasant fast. And then we were just gone, back to the hotel. Mom napped, Dad rested and read, and I did some writing and blogging, then we had the hotel book us a table for dinner at a place in business since 1903, and we headed back into town, feeling refreshed and hungry. The place was called Donatello’s, and there was an old guy going around greeting people and helping serve who was, in fact, Signore Donatello. He was, we gathered, a nephew of the founder, or a grand-nephew, or something. The place was very old-school and classy, except for more celebrity pictures on the wall – again including Pavarotti, who appears to be a well-traveled eater in Italy.

This restaurant had the first major signs of pasta with meat sauce we had seen on menu
s – not that it wasn’t around before, but Bolgnese Sauce is very close to what we all think of as “meat sauce” on spaghetti, for example. I had pasta with ham, cheese and white sauce, which was a lighter, thinner version of alfredo sauce – and was very, very good. Best pasta of the trip, I’d say; it was yellowish, rich, tasty, and the sauce and ham were just right. It also would have been a whole meal at home, but here it was just the pasta course, after a shared appetizer of sliced mushrooms and parmesan cheese on a bed of arugula. Bologna is just down the road from Parma, by the way – home of Parmesan cheese and Parma ham. Another interesting note: Dad and I both had a pasta course, and it was served with no spoon. I always wonder about the different methods of eating pasta, and the spoon-and-fork combo seems like the most reasonable, as well as the most Italian, but in Bologna there was no spoon.

My main dish was Vitello Donatello, their signature veal dish, and it was, again, much closer than anything we’d had to what we think of in America as Italian food. It was thinly sliced, paired with a slice of ham and another of parmesan cheese, lightly breaded and fried, then covered with the same white sauce and mushrooms and served with mashed potatoes. The potatoes weren’t good, but the veal rocked. For dessert I had panna cotta, which the poor waiter had a hard time explaining to us, since all the menu said was “creme,” and there was also on the menu a “creme caramel,” and something else (a parfait) that was translated as simply “creme.” So we just ordered one of each to see what we’d get. Dad’s was a selection of gelato, and Mom’s and mine were two very similar dishes, each of which was somewhere between a flan and a creme caramel without the top crusty. They were all just fine, and the dinner was enjoyable – and when we walked outside feeling warm and satisfied, I saw a condom vending machine on the wall of the restaurant. Not something you’d see in the states.

I completely nailed the driving on this evening, by the way. I had reached a point where the signs made sense to me, and I was confident enough to drop off my folks at the restaurant then go find a parking space in the same garage from earlier in the day, then improvise mildly to get us back out to the hotel. After the trial-by-fire the previous day on the highways, I felt like I had figured out Italian driving, and become somewhat Italian in the process. I realized that the essence of Italian driving is not rules, or lanes, or who has the right-of-way, or anything. It’s all timing and position, and if you can pass somebody without causing trouble, you do it. Otherwise it’s a matter of learning that brown signs are tourist places or business, blue ones are towns, green ones are roads, and off you go!

When we got back to the hotel, by the way, it was deserted. The leather crowd had vanished, and we had the place to ourselves.