Bologna is a veiled city, a hidden city, a layered city. It shows up in the pages of Byron (home of “popes, painters, and sausage”), in Dickens (“There is a grave and learned air about the city, and a pleasant gloom upon it. . . .”); Mozart played the organ in the cathedral of San Petronio (the oldest organ still in continuous use—dating from the late 15th century), and a young Michaelangelo carved figures to ornament St. Dominic’s tomb. It is everywhere heralded—even in Hell where Dante compared its famous (and famously leaning) Garisenda Tower to the giant Antaeus. Dozens of miles of covered porticos line narrow cobbled streets, opening suddenly on little squares and oddly angled churches—or constricting by increments before closing off entirely in a wall or bricked-up arch. Other walkways appear through distant doorways, interior courtyards wink from behind gated entrances. Dark brick towers rise suddenly around a corner and disappear a few paces later—at one point Bologna had nearly 200 of them, of which only a dozen or so remain. Two at the heart of the old city have become its emblem, although one had to be shortened to 40 meters on account of the hazard its precipitous lean presented. Wherever you walk, you are seeing just the surface—a door opens revealing a garden, a long narrow alley suddenly lines up as you stroll past and trails off into darkness, a shuttered shopfront for some reason is now open to disclose a small gallery. It’s all glimpses and gleanings. Time too veils Bologna—faded fragments of old frescoes emerge on church walls, a face, maybe a hand or glove; eroded carvings, coats of arms, escutcheons, heraldic devices, Madonnas and saints adorn outmoded doorways, facades, balustrades, capitals and columns. Mottos and messages from the past, remembering names long forgotten, dates and insignia worn to traces reach out through graffiti and slogans. A Miles Davis poster (itself a relic) is stuck to the battered oak door of the 13th century Castiglioni gateway: the temporal free-fall whispers this too shall pass.
It’s been going on for centuries, millennia. Bologna is the quintessential city, a monument to our shared desire to live among our own kind, to shape and re-shape our environment. Nearly everything you see, smell, and hear is the product of someone’s intent, someone’s art, or a byproduct of someone’s actions (e.g. the 3-a.m. Vespa shrieking down a deserted alleyway). Even Bolognese trees reveal this intentionality: surprisingly, the most popular is the gingko, (very tolerant of urban environments) and many are huge, but hardly native, snatched from time to ornament what must fade. In such a throng, most of nature is forced to the margins (and the market stalls) or out of the city altogether, yielding to pigeons and (in summer) mosquitoes. From our tiny north-facing balcony I saw a solitary sparrow (in 10 days) hopping about the patchwork backyards beneath our flat. The dogs you see in cafés and stores pace their entire lives on ancient pavement—as do their owners. A thoroughly human place; it’s like living in a vast and slightly chaotic house large enough to generate weather.
Back home last night I woke to a treefrog’s timeless aria in the gutter outside our window. Better even than Mozart on a well-built organ in the cathedral of San Petronio, and hopefully more lasting.
