Night train to Bari

This Modena hostel is the tidiest Italian hostel that I have stayed in so far. But there is one drawback: there is no refectory and hence no breakfast. I left my backpack with the hostel to collect on my way out. While at the counter I overheard an English-speaking hosteler ask about tours of the Ferrari plant. I thought about it for a few moments then decided that I wasn't that interested in fast cars, beautiful to look at as they may be. It amuses me to think that every time that I am passed by a testosterone-fueled driver in a Ferrari, he is putting pasta on a Modenese table.

The plan for today is to enjoy a few more hours in Modena, and in the late afternoon, catch the train to Bologna where I will have dinner, and check my email, until the night sleeper to Bari departs around midnight.

After having an alfresco breakfast of fruit nectar, muesli, cheese and strawberries, I explored the markets, open this Monday. I like looking at produce, smallgoods and baked goods.

At a cafe I had a snack of a fluffy pastry called orfella (if I read my handwriting correctly). I can't find any reference to this, so maybe I have misspelled it or it was a local appellation. Maybe someone in Modena might read this and enlighten me?

I like colourful flowers too.

Balsamic vinegar is about as expensive as wine.

There are many cyclists in the city and car traffic is discouraged in the centre. All in all, Modena seems a fairly decent city to live in.

I arrived in Bologna around 1700 and put my backpack in storage for a few hours. While walking around the centre, I bumped into Lorena and Nicolo, out shopping. I told them where I had been and where I was going. They wished me a good trip.

The station got seedier as the hour got later. However the platforms were crowded with passengers waiting for trains so there wasn't any danger at all. The train was a little late as expected, but no matter, we had all night to trundle down the east coast to the port city of Bari, in Apuglia, in the heel of Italy. I would be bypassing the less visited regions of Le Marche, Abruzzo and Molise. A pity, maybe some other trip.

A cold day

It was a cold and damp day, so I took my time leaving the hostel for the city. I wanted to rent a bike to explore a bit of the surrounding countryside, but the manager said that all the bikes were in disrepair and wouldn't be fixed until later in the season.

Today is not a very exciting touring day. My diary records a walk to Porta Saragozza, a lunch of polpetti (meat balls), ogling at huge wheels of parmesan cheese, and some shopping. I didn't want to stay in the city until late afternoon so I bought some bread and cheese for dinner.

The girl beggars in the streets (possibly Romanians because the languages are similar) are very persistent. They also work the trains. Their usual method is to leave a note on the seat as they walk past, and hope that you will have put a donation out for them when they do the return leg. They often get turned out of the trains by the conductors.

Back in the dorm I chat with Hohei, a Japanese boy who has come to Italy with the hope of playing trumpet with his jazz heroes. He's actually brought his instrument along. You have to hand it to the Japanese; when they get an obsession, they go all out to realise their dream. I invite him to come to Reggio Emilia with me tomorrow.

While eating my bread and cheese, an Italian woman struck up a conversation. It seems she's originally from Sicily, but lives in Reggio Emilia and doing a course in Bologna. She's got a slighly gammy leg. I think she just wanted a conversation, being away from home.

It had been a dull day and I only took 6 pictures all day. Time to move on.

A day in the life of Bologna

A normal working day today so plenty of buses to the city and no need to get out early. Also it's drizzling gently. That's probably why I slept well. It looks like the dramatic rain clouds that overshadowed Firenze when I was passing through have arrived in Emilia Romagna.

Today I will just wander around the city. The shops are full of wonderful produce and foodstuffs. This is indeed a foodie's heaven.

I have a lunch of chicken fillets wrapped in prosciutto at Tamburini, a well-known deli and restaurant. The place is full of workers in their lunch hour. It was very casual self-service, you just pick what you want and pay at the cashier. There are no labels on the dishes, I guess the locals know what's what. It was so hard to decide, everything looked good.

After that a desert of a rum ball from a confectioner for 1€. The Italians can even make a sundae from Maccas taste good. The secret is Baci chocolate sauce. Baci is of course made by Perugina, whom we met back in Perugia. The Maccas is quite tolerant, I'm sitting at an outside table reading The Story of San Michele and writing in my diary and nobody's asked me to move on. San Michele is on Capri way down south near Napoli and the events in that autobiography are a century old. The style of writing is quite idiosyncratic and fanciful in parts but the book is entertaining and was very popular. I visited that villa on my first journey to Europe 25 years ago and I remembered that the setting was as beautiful as Axel Munthe lavishly praised.

Porticos are a feature of buildings here. They extend for long distances out of the city and it is possible to walk kilometers without getting exposed to sun or rain.

Here is one of the old city gates.

From research in book shops and online I have collected enough information to decide that I will take an overnight sleeper south, then stay overnight in the resort town of Trani, which is about 40 km from Bari, before taking the Jadrolinija ferry to Dubrovnik. Trani is more pleasant than Bari and yet is close enough for me to get to the ferry terminal without stress. The ferry goes east on certain days only and I have picked next Wednesday so my touring days in Emilia Romagna are numbered.

I have arranged to meet Davide, from the local Linux users' group, ERLUG, for dinner. He takes me on a walk to a member's home, where Luigi and Lorena live with their two sons, Francesco and Nicolo. Luigi and Lorena are both economists and have trained overseas and speak English quite well. After a few minutes, Davide excuses himself as he has a meeting to attend, leaving me with my hosts. The reason I have been invited to dine with them is because Francesco will be an exchange student in Canberra soon and they are curious about Australia. We exchange a lot of information about Italian and Australian culture. I mention that balsamic vinegar seems plentiful in Emilia Romagna. They say but you know, if it's really top quality stuff, the host will offer you only a teaspoonful, so high is the price. I guess most of us have to make do with the standard quality product.

Luigi has to take the dog, Hugo, for an evening walk so we continue our conversation in the park. Unfortunately Luigi has never quite warmed to Hugo and Hugo knows it. So he refuses to leave the house, perhaps suspecting that Luigi will do away with him or something like that. So Luigi has to get Nicolo to accompany us to placate the dog. Luigi is impressed that I know so much about Italian films. I explain that we get a lot of great world films in our arthouse cinemas, and we also have SBS. When I mention that I admired Nanni Moretti's recent opus La Stanza del Figlio (The Son's Room), Luigi put his hand on his heart and said, that story really gets you here.

We talked late into the evening and Luigi gave me a lift back to the hostel because the buses had stopped running by that time.

The fat red one

Bologna has several nicknames. It's called la grassa because of the good food, and la rossa because of the red bricks and tiles, but also because most years since WWII it has been a bastion of left-wing governments. And today being May Day, I correctly guessed that there would be street parades. But the real action was in Piazza Maggiore. Socialist and humanitarian groups were staffing solidarity stalls there. A heavy metal band on the stage started playing Smoke on the Water.

Bologna lies in the fertile Po valley of Emilia Romagna and is one of a string of cities linked by the ancient Via Emilia, which still runs straight as an arrow through the cities, changing names. Near the piazza it was called Via Rizzoli.

What looks like three panels of mosaics surrounding the Italian and European Union flags in this picture, turns out to be many tiles, each tile bearing a photo of a partisan who died fighting the fascists and the Germans in the later part of WWII. Losses in this part of Italy were heavy. It is from this tradition of resistance that the leftist leaning of Emilia Romagna emerged.

This book fair, near the station, drew a lot of browsers. Bologna has the oldest university in the west, established in 1088. I explored the University area on foot for a bit, and then found lunch in a cafe. It was cannelloni with ricotta and ragù, and a salad sprinkled with balsamic vinegar. Incidentally there is no such thing as spaghetti alla Bolognese in Italy. The closest thing is pasta al ragù, and tagliatelle or lasagne are more likely to used in the north. For desert I picked two flavours at a nearby gelateria: due torri (two towers, hazelnut with black and white chocolate bits), and pistachio. The pistachio was incredibly fresh tasting, might even have been roasted that morning.

Here are the real due torri. They are the most famous of many towers constructed in Bologna in the 12th and 13th centuries. They seem uselessly tall for that era. I think it was basically a case of: My tower is taller than yours; Oh yeah? Watch this. Today they are a well-known meeting point.

An iron steed that had seen better days.

Since the hostel didn't serve dinner, the day's plan was to wander around until late afternoon and then have an early dinner before catching the bus back to the hostel outside the city. I browsed in some book shops (part of the reason was to peek at travel guides to get an idea of whether I had enough time to see a bit of Apuglia before catching the ferry to Dubrovnik in Croatia). I also sat at an Internet cafe catching up with email. It seems that all Internet cafes in Italy are required to record the identity of customers; this one took a photocopy of my passport details.

Passignano, Firenze and Bologna

I'm a bit sorry to leave Perugia. It's a peaceful place and grows on you. The upper town is mostly free of cars and its two universities inject youth into the city. But I'm energised by the prospect of reuniting with my backpack, so northwards I press.

Getting to the train station was an example of why life in Italy is like a yoyo. I got to the bus stand at 0915 and the train would leave at 0954 from the station in the lower city. Buy a ticket at a booth. Not sure which side of the square my bus leaves from. A bus arrives and the driver gets off and closes the bus. Another bus arrives, this one displaying the right destination. Ask the driver. No, not his bus, but number 6 or 7 parked behind him. Driver for 7 arrives. Ask him and he says yes he's leaving soon. Get into bus, wait for a while, nothing happens, then start worrying. Eventually he starts off. Arrive at the station with 10 minutes to spare. Fortunately I know what the station looks like and where to get off. Uh oh, there's a long line of people at the ticket counter. Fortunately they are fairly efficient at dispensing tickets. Get to the platform with 5 minutes to spare. Many people travelling today. The train is so full that I have to walk through half a carriage before I can find a free seat.

I take a 90 minute stopover at Passignano, or to give its full name, Passignano sul Trasimeno. Lake Trasimeno was previously known as the Lake of Perugia. It has no inlet or outlet and was formed in a geological depression. It's slightly smaller than Lake Como and thus big enough that you cannot see the northern shore from Passignano. Besides, the day was overcast but temperate.

In 217 BCE, at northern shore of the lake, at the Battle of Lake Trasimene, the Carthaginians inflicted a terrible defeat on Roman troops, killing some 15000. The place names there bear witness to the carnage: Sanguineto (Bloody Stream), Ossaia (Place of Bones) and so forth. Years later, the Romans would level Carthage and remove their rivals for Mediterranean supremacy from history. Today Passignano is a peaceful resort town with tourist trinkets and lake cruises in season, March to September.

A poster on the train advertises a new cross-peninsular service linking Rome and Ancona on the east coast. Perhaps it will bring more visitors to the little visited Italian region of Le Marche. I would like to stopover on my way down south later, but I doubt if I will have the time.

Somewhere outside Passignano, the train crosses from Umbria into Toscana. We are now in the much sought after land of the Tuscan sun.

Graffito on a wall in Montevarchi: Bush-Blair-Berlusca - La tribù di Belzebù. Not surprising in a region which is left-leaning.

At Firenze station, where I change trains, there is an exposition of posters coinciding with a leftist congress. Here are two:

The Firenze-Bologna train is a Eurostar express service and started in Rome. In such comfort I arrived in Bologna quickly.

At Bologna, I get a map and directions from the tourist office. But before I leave the station, there is a grim memorial I want to see.

At 10:25 in the morning of August 2nd, 1980, a bomb detonated inside the waiting room of the station. The summer day was warm and the air-conditioned room was packed. The blast was strong enough to cause the roof to collapse. 85 people died and many more were injured in the worst mass attack in Italy since WWII. The perpetuators were a right-wing fascist group, striking in the heart of leftist Italy.

The crack in the outer wall has been retained and the station clock is permanently stopped at 10:25 am in memory of the atrocity. A plaque records the names of the victims. There are a handful of non-Italian names, hapless tourists in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The hostel is a bus ride outside the city, in bucolic surroundings. The manager brings out my backpack after I check in. But, but... what has customs done to it? The front combination lock is gone, cut away. Never mind, it can be replaced. The back is where they have not cut the padlock but snipped the zipper tabs off. This makes it hard to close up the back, where the backstraps are stored. Ratbags! I assume what happened is that when they came to inspect my backpack, the keys I gave the airline representative were not to hand so they just mauled the zippers. Sigh.

The hostel has a refectory, but it isn't operating. So the manager collects orders from the hostelers in the common room for dial-a-pizza.

One of the hostelers is an Australian woman with a tale of woe. One of her bags was stolen at a bus station while she was distracted. She's contemplating giving up and going home. I persuade her to carry on since she's come so far.