L
a Dotta. La Grassa. La Rossa. The
learned. The fat. The red. Stereotypes
they may be, but Bologna’s nicknames
are on the money. To this day, it’s Italy’s let-
wing bastion, held irm by Europe’s oldest
university. And it’s not only Italy’s food
capital; Bologna is the world capital of what
we call Italian food. This is a place where
plates arrive heaving with pasta hand-rolled
that morning, drowned in parmesan; where
tagliatelle is fried and dusted with sugar for
a wintry treat; where ham hocks dangle from
shop ceilings, wheels of cheese are stacked
by the till and frothy Lambrusco is quafed
by the litre as a palate-cleanser for all that
grease. Tortellini, lasagne, tortelloni, ragu
— Bologna is the epicentre of them all.
While they’re widely used today, those
nicknames are longstanding because within
the ancient city walls, Bologna’s present is
also its past. The centre is a web of medieval
streets, knitted together by 25 miles of
porticoes (some frescoed, others mosaic-
loored, all a respite from the humidity). Look
up, and you’ll see medieval beams propping
up buildings and looming brick towers
— the skyscrapers that made this a medieval
Manhattan. Look inwards, and nondescript
wooden doors will reveal themselves as the
entrances to a lorid church, a museum or a
frescoed cafe. Go beneath the surface and
you’ll ind Roman streets, early Christian
crypts, even medieval bell towers swaddled
by their later replacements.Bologna’s simplicity is its beauty, putting
the focus on what the Bolognese do best:
living. Even the history is alive: food-sellers
hawk their wares in the tangled medieval
market, artisans beaver away in the former
Jewish quarter, and the art stays in quiet
situ, instead of being loodlit in a museum.
In fact, Bologna’s best museum is its open-
air one: Piazza Maggiore, where a brace of
castles (now council buildings) square of
against the basilica of San Petronio, a church
so enormous that the locals gave up on the
marble cladding halfway through. Today, the
Bolognese parade beneath the porticoes and
students snog on the basilica steps, while an
immense bronze Neptune fountain acts as
ringmaster to it all.April 2020 149