I returned from Italy at the beginning of June. I've been back about 3 weeks. I do keep my own blog, but I didn't post during the trip since I was traveling lighter than a laptop would allow and faster than what is typically required for me to turn impression into linear thought. My husband and I made the recession-busting trip (take that, recession!) to visit our son who has been studying abroad for the year at the University of Bologna. We traveled with him throughout northern Italy but did stay 4 days in Bologna, a city I have fallen in love with. I have fallen in love with porticoes.
I haven't written much about the trip since I've been back, either. Partly, I leapt so quickly out of the end of the school year onto that airplane that there's been much to sort and shuffle since my return. Partly, in as much as every trip is a series of discoveries to be made–new language, people, landscape, food–a trip also becomes a series of leave takings from those people and landscapes, from the language that had begun to embed itself in my ear. From a certain pace, a certain cast of light. I have been negotiating that inner departure.
What might be of interest to those who aren't familiar with Bologna is that it is a city that still retains its medieval design and dusky red walls laid out from the city center, the Piazza Maggiore, with streets radiating in spoke-like fashion. The streets are sheltered by an extensive system of porticoes covering marble walkways so that you can walk literally miles and remain protected from sun or rain. How civil. L'Universita di Bologna, the oldest in Europe and founded in 1088, includes both Dante and Copernicus as alumni. Umberto Eco teaches there today. Bologna is a city full of students, 100,000 from all over the world. The porticoes are marked by their graffiti yet faded frescoes still trace the arched ceilings overhead.
When I look at my journal notes I wonder which observation bears repeating–they can't all be said. We arrived in May. Bologna was the color of autumn, red, yellow, brown. The pages in my journal kept turning toward June. Not only is a trip comprised of passing through a particular time and place, it soon becomes about how a time and place passes through the traveler.
We walked through these porticoes.
These were our windows.
We lived for 4 days behind this door.
And I, I am full of Bologna.
-Sally Ashton