Category: Italy, Bologna 2025

There should be a rule about not visiting two palaces in one day. That is precisely what I did today and the images are confused in my mind. This morning was the 450 room ducal palace of the Gonzaga family; this afternoon their pleasure palace, Palazzo Te. Palazzo Te had amazingly painted ceilings, as did…

Mantua was about two hours from Bologna by train, and a small city with a dramatically different feel. Everything is much slower in Mantua. After a slow lunch we visited three churches: tiny San Lorenzo from the 11th century, a place Matilda of Canosa worshipped; Sant’ Andrea, the large basilica; and the cathedral. The city…

This visit to Bologna has been very relaxed and low stress. Last night’s dinner was a memorable one in a tiny restaurant where dishes a grandmother might have cooked were elevated to the sublime — a mortadella and potato sformatino (sort of soufflé), eggplant Parmesan, white meat lasagne, and tiramisu. Today we began in the…

Not many pictures today, although I have been busy. We started off to visit one of the larger churches, San Giacomo Maggiore. The church was a forest of scaffolding, but the Bentovoglio chapel was open and newly restored with its paintings dating from 1486. Next door was the extraordinary oratory of Santa Cecilia. The walls…

A perfectly beautiful day which included a visit to Santo Stefano, a complex of six or seven churches at one end of Piazza Santo Stefano, a triangular piazza and one of the most beautiful in the city; the old university (one of Europe’s first) and its dissecting theater; and the small church of Santa Maria…

Getting here required two planes, a bus and one train, all on time, but it was a long day. This afternoon I met a friend from Nashville at the train station, or tried to: as it turns out, there is a second and even larger station below the main station. We ended up meeting at…