Bologna e' bella

Bologna
After the disaster that was Milan, Natalie and I decided to take a smaller day trip to Bologna for the weekend instead of go on a larger trip. We took a midmorning Regional Veloce (Fast Regional) train to Bologna, and arrived in a beautiful, bustling city where it was 12 degrees Celsius (plenty warm!). So with the sun shining, we began to explore.

Bologna is not a tourist city. It’s home to the first European university (which was quite lovely, and redbrick, and has 5 museums dedicated to various sciences. We went into the biology one, and got to see tons and tons of stuffed animals), and some towers, and so on, but it’s most just Italians being Italians. It was extremely refreshing not to be bogged by tourist traps and postcard stands. The Two Towers are the symbol of the city, and sadly not a reference to LOTR. They’re both starting to lean over pretty bad as their foundations shift. There’s also a pretty baller fountain (will post Photos…), and a piazza with a beautiful yet simple (by Renissance standards) basillica. Fun fact: All of these things are free. After 6 bucks per museum in every other city, Bologna is a wallet’s godsend.

Bologna is instead a gastronomic haven. Tuscany is still the head of food in Italy, but Emilia-Romagna, the region where Bologna is located, is a decent, cheap, tourist-free solution. Our lunch was at a pizza place with a huge line, named, aptly, the Two Towers. It was very similar to Antonios, except that it was cheaper, and the slices were bigger, and the line was 20 people deep. Oh, and the pizza was fantastic. It was almost like American pizza in its greasyness, but still no sauce. I had proscuitto and fungi, and Natalie ditched the fungi. It was absolutely the best pizza I had in Italy, and totally worth it. We quickly walked over to a gelato place, and had our fill.

We then took off to see the sites. Before lunch we’d actually seen a random open air market, of 100s of stands, filled with clothes and jewelry and purses and shoes and various other crap, including dentistry tools, that must have “fallen off the truck”, it was so cheap. I bought a pair of socks J We’d also passed a beautiful park with some turtle and mermaid statues J After lunch, we actually ran into the two towers accidently on the way to gelato. Cross one off the list. We explored Piazza Maggiore as well (home of various other sites) and the University and its museum. We also stumbled across a few delis, where I insisted on buying cheese (Parmesano-Reggiano!), and an English bookstore, where we took safe haven and savored knowing a language fluently almost as much as the food. We both bought some English novels, since we burned through the ones we brought. It was extremely comforting to have a bit of Americana again.

Once we had our fill, we returned to a wiki-recommended restaurant close to the train station named Trattoria Tony. We decided to try the regional specialities: Pasta, and Bollito Misto (Mixed Boiled *Meat*). Natalie ordered Taglietelli al Ragu, which “she really liked”. I had the Ricotta Tortelloni with Butter and Sage Sauce. It was literally the best pasta of my life. I could have eaten it forever. It was creamy yet textured, and extremely flavorful. Bollito Misto is traditionally serve with potato puree (mashed potatoes) and green salsa(salsa meaning sauce, not chunky tomatoes). So once we finished our pasta, our waiter brought us this green mush and some spoons. We had no idea what to do with it. We both tried it on our bread, and it was crazy vinegary. Eventually, we realized this was the green salsa, which was way denser than either of us had imagined. The waiter brought us the plate of boiled beef, pork, and tongue. It tasted similar to pot roast, but was extremely fatty. Also, no one should ever eat tongue. Tongue should never taste a fellow tongue. It just tastes wrong, like a weird sausage. After such a fantastic meal, Natalie and I left for the train station, and agreed that Bologna was pretty boss.