Seeing Bologna at night was a bit easier than Naples. It has wider streets, lower buildings, larger piazzas, and much better lighting. Also, it has one of the most unusual features of a city I’ve seen (which we saw in Poppi on a much smaller scale), which is miles of covered loggias lining most of the major streets. I’m not sure of the history, but somehow, everyone started building loggias at the base of their buildings. I suppose that early builders were enticed because they could build into the public right-of-way while allowing the sidewalk to pass below. I was actually kind of hoping for rain for once, because we could have stayed pretty dry walking through town (aside from crossing the streets). For dinner, we were hoping to have some of the famously good Bolognese food (like the Bolognese sauce, similar to what is most common in the US- spaghetti and hamburger meat sauce), and so we used our driver Angelo to use his Italian fluency to lead us to a good, and cheap spot. Unfortunately, we were led not to a Bolognese restaurant, but to a Neapolitan restaurant, so technically we still got a lot of tomato sauce and a pretty good meal, but no Bolognese sauce.The rain that we missed in Bologna apparently went to Ferrara by mistake, because when we arrived there after leaving Bologna that morning, it felt like we were back in Belgium with cold wind and rainy conditions. We stayed long enough to walk around the Duke’s castle (with a moat!), check out the cathedral and the market in the square next door, and a few other plazas and squares (one that we saw mostly from a coffee shop because it was so cold).
From Ferrara, we continued our trek northward to Venice. The original plan was to take a ferry in so we could approach Venice from the water, just as wealthy Venetians would have done coming from their summer villas in the “suburbs.” We stopped to take pictures in front of the most famous of these near Venice, the Villa Malcontenta by Andrea Palladio, one of the most important architects of the Renaissance. (Unfortunately, we missed the ferry, so we ended up driving into Venice anyway. We did take the vaparetto, or the bus-boat, close to the hotel, so we saw the Grand Canal and the Ponte Rialto (bridge) on the way.)
One of the challenging things about Venice is that it is impossible to get vehicles into the center city because of all the canals and stepped bridges, so we still had to walk and carry bags over stairs a bit. It also makes the service functions of the city much more challenging, and it’s one of the reasons it’s so expensive to do pretty much everything in Venice. Basically, goods have to be brought in by boat, unloaded, and carted to the various stores and restaurants. We even saw people dumping trash into a garbage barge that was stopped in one of the canals. It’s pretty interesting stuff that we really take for granted because it’s something that has been prioritized in modern planning (to the detriment of other functions. Often, service access is planned while public areas are the left over stuff).
I hate to be negative, but I really don’t get all the fuss about Venice. Yeah, they have canals. So does Bruges, which also has trees and doesn’t smell bad. Yeah, they have the guys in funny hats who will row you around the canals, but it’s like 70-80 euros (and did I mention it smells bad?). Frankly, they’ve done a pretty good job at building the city up as this really romantic tourist destination, which is unfortunately all they have as far as industry. This is basically the same impression I got during my last visit as well. Fortunately, they did have the best shower I've come across in my travels so far, and compared to the no shower I have at my apartment, I'm pretty grateful.
Venice does have some really cool public spaces and architecture, which was really the point of the visit anyway. Our first stop was Piazza di San Marco, which is one of the greatest public spaces in the world according to most people you ask. It is one of the largest we’ve been to thus far, and it has one of the most ornate and unique Medieval churches we’ve seen. Venice was basically the only power in Italy for centuries prior to the church growing in Rome and the Renaissance because it reinvigorated European trade after the fall of the Roman empire, and it was heavily influenced by the Eastern Roman empire and later the Byzantine empire, whose capital was in Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey). That is why you get such interesting architectural forms, such as onion domes on top, and also why the church is Romanesque (with round arches), rather than Gothic (pointed arches) like most Medieval churches. The whole interior of the church is covered in incredible gold mosaics, which was common in Byzantine churches and is very well done for the time period.
We went to the top of the Campanile (bell tower) in the piazza and got the full panorama of the city, and afterwards we wandered around for a while looking for food. We basically did the same thing on Saturday, and in addition to finding our hotel from last time, I found the piazza where we had our spontaneous late night art show. We also went to a beautiful mass at San Marco (although again in Italian), and it was really nice because they had all the lights on so you could see the mosaics really clearly.
Sunday was spent with more walks, but this time through areas I did not make it to last time. The coolest was a piazza off the beaten path that is the center of a real Venetian neighborhood. The space itself was great—it was a large, u-shaped piazza with a smaller church in the center, but the coolest part was what was happening inside the church. Around noon, people began slowly streaming out, and we decided to go inside and take a look. About 20 minutes after the service there was a familiar scene—many members of the congregation still in the aisle talking with each other, chatting with the preacher, and tidying up the sanctuary. I can only assume that these families left to go home, eat, and spend their Sunday afternoon together. Some things, it would seem, are universal (appropriate, being that catholic in the general sense means universal). Though we have different church traditions, cities, cultures, and lifestyles, some things are the same even halfway around the globe. In traditional cities, religion tends to become a central focus of the civic life of the community, as is evident in the architectural hierarchy of neighborhoods and towns. In this particular neighborhood, the church is clearly the most important structure (since it is in the middle of the piazza with rounded elements and a tall bell tower), just as in Watkinsville, the Ashford brothers perched their church on a hill, gave it a powerful façade and a tall steeple.
Religion tends to provide a common value system within a community, but as our societies change, however, the architectural framework changes with it. In most Italian cities, church towers remain as the highest structures in town, and the same goes for many small towns in America. However, if you were to put one of these small town churches into the parking lot of a large shopping center, it would be totally lost in the expanse of openness and would really lose its significance among the other mundane elements around it. The sad part is, most suburban churches are doing this exact thing by putting their churches (now jumbo-sized) in the middle of a parking lot, and even making them look like vastly scaled up suburban houses (the large Presbyterian church which is dwarfed by the larger OCHS comes to mind). There is no longer anything special or significant about it because it simply blends in with the rest of the suburban landscape of parking lots and generic buildings. If you compare the two models, the suburban church is essentially a community, but only on Sunday and special events because it is isolated from where parishioners live and work. The church in Venice, on the other hand, is literally the center of the community all week long because the congregation mostly lives, works, and worships together. If you think about larger towns though, like Athens, Atlanta, Chicago, etc., the situation becomes even worse because church towers are literally overshadowed by tall residential and commercial towers, therefore totally upending the traditional hierarchy of cities. So the question that comes to my mind is this: If the character and structure our cities are a reflection of our societal values, what does this say about our priorities?
That’s pretty much Part I of our trip in a rather large nutshell. In Part II – Padua and Palladio, Vicenza and Verona, Mantua and mountain towns.
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