Early the next morning, Anara and I packed up the rental car and headed down the mountains out of Petrognano. The drive to Bologna would take about an hour and 45 minutes and my first photo in Bologna was at 11:30. If memory serves, we probably left about 9:00 and stopped for gas near the drop off location so we didn’t get charged a million dollars for rental car company gas.
I also believe this is where we took an incredibly frustrating wrong turn. If you miss an exit or interchange, you WILL end up on the Highway of Unending Hell near Florence. I cannot overstate this: Do NOT miss a turn. Unless you have an extra hour to burn making the same mistake over and over and over. The signage was not very clear and if it was, it was difficult to follow which ended up making for a tense little bit of navigating.
Ok, out of purgatory and back on the right road….
One fun fact: The A1 highway has several really, REALLY long tunnels and one boasts the claim to fame that it’s the longest TBM- (Tunnel Boring Machine) made tunnel in the European Union to date (this was originally posted on my original blogsite 3 years ago, so this may be changed.). It’s called the Santa Lucia Tunnel and is over 7.5 km long! I didn’t know that at the time, of course, but I do remember that Anara and I kept exclaiming how incredibly long it was and wondering if it’d ever end!!!
https://www.marcantonini.com/en/hig…the-largest-tbm-in-europe-has-been-completed
Storytime with Liesa:
I dropped off the car and was careful to do a walk around and even took a couple of photos. Just in case, ya know. The parking lot was a couple of blocks away from the actual office, and when we dropped the keys off there, I was told that they did not have someone available who could go over and check it in for us. However, the clerk said,”It’s ok, you’re good to go.”
Word to the wise, never do that.
Jump forward to several weeks after I got to Arizona, long since dropping that car off…. I get this email saying there was damage to the driver’s side mirror. Oh? Hmm… While I was pretty sure it was a scam, there was no way of knowing since they didn’t look at it with me and maybe I’d missed something. In the same way, there was no way of THEM knowing either and that’s what should have clued me in. I confess, I did panic a bit and tried to reach out to the company. I even replied to the email and was told, “You’ll need to wire us some money or give us your CC number.” That’s when it was game over for them. If there was damage, too bad, Losers. Come and check your car in next time.
The End.
Anyways, the car was dropped off and we then found a little place to grab a bite of lunch before finding a taxi to take us to our Airbnb for the next 2 nights. It was neither inspiring nor delicious. But it filled the void and held us off until dinner. We’d more than make up for that lackluster waste of money later….
Our Airbnb turned out to be nothing very special at all. Again, like lunch, it was adequate and clean, but very sterile and ho-hum. It was set back into a courtyard very near the city’s main piazza, so the proximity to what we wanted to see was a bonus.
Here’s the listing, should you be interested.
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/1566003?source_impression_id=p3_1707947233_t27ZnsjNa7uxWPPB
Bologna- The City of Porticos and Food!!
As an introduction, Bologna is famous for its more than 62 km of porticos most of which are in the city center. These covered promenades are super diverse, some updated with modern touches, some with original fresco work still in place, some very plain with rustic charm. I was smitten with their photographic beauty. Bologna is also where foodies come to die and go to Heaven. Just up the road is Parma where parmesan cheese is born, and Modena where the best balsamic vinegar comes from. It’s still in the heart of MeatLand and both potatoes AND pasta live in glorious harmony. Now that the scene is set and your mouth is watering, onto the touring!
A long morning in the car deserved a long walk around town. We didn’t have to walk far at all to find our first of Bologna’s famous porticos. They are everywhere and all so unique and all very beautiful. In fact, our Airbnb was adjacent to one (not the prettiest, but still cool!) and we passed through it many times in our comings and goings.
The Church that Ticked the Pope Off (as another author wrote):
Our first destination was the Main Piazza to see the amazing San Petronio Basilia.
What a fantastic piece of history this is where you can find gorgeous stained glass, a façade that has its own bizarre history, and even a piece of ground-breaking astronomy for its time.
San Petronio is massive. But while it’s huge in size, its facing is still unfinished. Seriously, it is so odd. But here’s the story:
Construction began in 1390 and Bologna had plans to make it the biggest church on Earth- bigger than St. Peter’s in Vatican. This ticked off the Pope who built a “spite building” next door so it couldn’t expand anymore. But the façade was still undone because no one could agree on HOW to finish it. However, just in 2017 there was a competition, and someone did win, so there’s that. Maybe it’ll be finished 700 years later. LOL! The whole thing amuses me.
Here’ the article I’m getting my info from:
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/12/san-petronio-basilica-church-that.html
Anyway, on the inside:
“The Basilica of San Petronio also boasts of the longest indoor meridian line in the world, measuring 66.8 meters. It was laid in 1656 by the famous Italian astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini. A hole on the roof of the Basilica allows the sun to shine through and make an elliptical spotlight on the meridian marking the passing of days and seasons.
Using the meridian line at San Petronio, Cassini was able to measure the change in diameter of the Sun’s disk over the year as the Earth moved toward and then away from the Sun. He concluded the changes in size he measured were consistent with Johannes Kepler’s 1609 heliocentric theory, where the Earth was moving around the Sun in an elliptical orbit instead of the Ptolemaic system where the Sun orbited the Earth in an eccentric orbit.”
SAY WHAT?!!!
(A few of the shots of the science-y side of the basilica):
The whole inside is soooooo cool! There is this massive astronomical thing going on, a working pendulum, and some seriously amazing stained glass work. Here are a few of the shots I took of the inside:
One more sidenote I found interesting… apparently, there is an image of Mohammed burning in Hell, and this church has been saved from a few terrorist attacks in recent years. I didn’t see it or even know about it and glad it was saved from being blown up.
We are very glad we visited this church; it was very well worth it; but it was time to move on to some other sites. Of course, we saw a few more of these gorgeous porticos along the way:
The Two Towers: No, not those two towers, the two leaning towers of Bologna, Silly!
Just around the corner from the Basilica is another landmark of Bologna, the “other leaning towers of Italy”- the ones that most people don’t know about or visit. Sure, Pisa’s is probably prettier, but the Bologna towers lean at a steeper angle making them a bit more awesome. Plus, there are two of them. I know this may come as a shock to you, but this was yet another pissing war that Bologna seemed to be in the habit of having. Two families built these to show which was the more powerful. “Quick, Giovanni, put up another floor, Guido is ahead by 3 feet!”
Sadly, the towers no longer accept visitors as they’ve become too dangerous and could fall at anytime. A huge barrier has been put around them now in case that happens, but it was neat to see them even without being able to climb them.
Art For Everyone’s Taste:
Our little stroll through the heart of the city was just delightful. Several artists and buskers were out picking up change as they could and we really enjoyed stopping for a few moments to admire their talents.
Just as you approach the church is another work of art: The Fountain of Neptune (we’d seen a few different iterations in several of the cities we’d been to), but this one was…. well, you be the judge. Eh hemmmmm…….. It leaves little to the imagination.
And it’s never a wrong decision to stop and grab some gelato either during your Italian outings. I’ll leave off with this little beauty so you can drool without the distraction of more drivel.
