ON THE ROAD: Bologna, a room with a view.

 

From the bathroom, no less!  Ann and I made all  our connections easily and met at the Bologna airport. We took a shuttle to the third atop, as indicated on the hotel website, with the help of a very nice driver who didn’t speak English but spoke French, and got a taxi there. There was a bookshop at the taxi stop and the kind lady there, who spoke neither English or French  helped us to call a taxi. Five minutes and 10€ later, we were at our hotel.

 

It’s called Hotel Novocento and it lives up to its name. Though the outside of the building is ancient, in the small, charming Piazza Galileo, it’s very modern on the inside and is centrally located to all the major attractions.  Our room is pictured on the site, if you’d care to look. It’s the only twin-bedded room with the white wooded sloping ceilings with shutters, which we kept open. We have a long bench under the eaves – there’s one window in the bedroom and two huge ones in the bathroom, one in the shower!!

The town is a gorgeous Renaissance masterpiece and one can almost imagine Romeo and Juliet flirting in the square. There are present-day Romeos and Juliets doing that now, as it is a very important center of learning for italy. There are kids EVERYWHERE!  I thought I was in campus at Berkeley!

We wandered the central area and strolled for a few hours, then settled in to a restaurant called 015, noted on the map as “a favorite” and it was truly wonderful: we split a lasagna bolognese, and we split a caprese salad, with freshly picked tomatoes and basil, accompanied by buffalo mozzarella cheese  I had a glass of vino bianco of the region, and Ann had vino rosso, also local –  perfect!  The lasagna was not like the American version : it was subtle and not heavy at all. We both sighed when we took our first bites!! Amazing. The price was also amazing, very reasonable for the quality of food.

We strolled back in the dark, the mere few blocks to our hotel, thinking we’d suddenly gotten into a time warp, as the illuminated Renaissance buildings guided our way home.

I managed to get myself a shower; after no sleep in either the ten-hour flight from San Francisco to Paris, or the almost two hour flight from Paris to Bologna, my mind and body shut down at 10 pm. I woke at 2:00 am and assumed I’d not return to the land of slumber; however the next I knew it was 6:30 am  – hooray! I slept better than usual for the first night  I’ll check in later today – or maybe tomorrow morning – and let you know what happened on day 2 of the trip.