aubreyholland.com

Last weekend there was a big art fair in Bologna, so of course I was dying to go, and I managed to convince Hannah to come along. She’s a pretty good sport like that. The fair itself had 240 galleries from all over the place (but mostly from Italy), and it was huge. There’s so much to see that by the end of the day your feet hurt like crazy and you basically have no idea what you’ve just seen. This was my personal favorite, though… I’m a sucker for this pen and ink stuff.

While we were there, we decided to spend Sunday touring around Bologna. I had no idea what to expect, and after spending most of Saturday at the art fair, which is in the industrial part of town, I wasn’t expecting too much. When we got to the city center, though, we found that it is really quite a beautiful place. There were some great things to see, and the fact that it’s a university town seemed to make it seem really ‘alive’. One interesting thing was that almost all of the streets have arcades, like the one here.

Funny how all of these cities seem to have their own distinguishing characteristic. I imagine the city planners hundreds of years ago saying “How can we be different from Florence? I know, let’s build crazy arcade things!” or “I know, let’s build our city in the middle of a lagoon!”

Apparently there was quite a contest going on to see who could build the biggest tower in Bologna, with seemingly unpleasant results. Our guidebook said that there were over a hundred of them but that now they’re down to 15. Not a great success rate, and given the lean on one of the towers that was near our hotel, it’s pretty clear that these things don’t end well. They said that this thing was tilting by 3.5 meters.

We climbed the taller tower in the background of that picture (only 1.5 meters lean) and got a fantastic view of the city.

There was a huge basilica there that was originally supposed to be bigger than St. Peter’s in Rome. I thought this was really funny, but the Pope apparently told them that they weren’t allowed to make it bigger, so they just stopped building it. It’s still pretty darn huge… the third picture here is of the corner of the thing, where they clearly just lopped it off when they had to stop building. It’s also in the center of the first tower view picture above.

Just because I seem to have to add some ‘creepy’ things to each post here, I’ll throw these in. They have what they call an anatomy theatre at the old university, which is where the students would dissect cadavers back in the day. The room was amazingly immaculate, with wooden sculptures of various people, but right in the middle there were these crazy skinless guys. Cool, but creepy!

For anybody not yet aware, Venice is in the middle of the water. Well, technically, it’s in the middle of a lagoon. Sounds spooky, doesn’t it? It turns out that a lagoon is actually just a body of water that is separated from a larger body of water by some land mass (thanks again, wikipedia). In Venice’s case, the land mass is almost entirely made up of the island of Lido, which forms a sort of protective barrier from the Gulf, mostly keeping the water level from fluctuating too wildly here. Here’s a map. Since it’s easily reachable from public transportation, it’s also a great place to go to the beach. Today was, literally, the first sunny day we’ve had since we’ve been here, so we took a trip out there, and here are a few pictures. It’s pretty much just a beach, but I thought I’d post them anyway.

One of my favorite things about being here is the food. I remember being in Europe before and feeling really jealous of the fresh food and the way things are built around buying things every day at the market to have for dinner. Venice has really taken this idea and turned it up to eleven, and I love it. Not only do they have tons of different kinds of produce/meats/seafood/cheese, but they are all very fresh, very local, and (surprisingly, to me) very very cheap. Since I, suffice to say, don’t have a lot of other responsibilities, this is fantastic because I have plenty of time to actually enjoy cooking.

At the Rialto they have the biggest market in the city, and it’s really something. The main part of it is a fish market, and I don’t think I can come up with a single creature that lives in the ocean that I haven’t seen for sale there. Sharks, rays, all manner of things with tentacles, and plenty of things that I have no idea what they are. Here’s a few pictures from there…

That thing in the first picture that looks like the head of a swordfish is, in fact, the head of a swordfish.

In addition to the fish market, they have what has to be the world’s biggest collection of vegetable stands. Here are a couple of pictures that don’t do any justice whatsoever to the size of it.

Other than the really creep relics, the Santa Maria dei Frari was a really amazing place. It’s a huge church that was built by the Franciscans in 1338 and is probably big enough to hold at least 4000 full grown elephants. Here’s a picture of the interior.

Aside from the size of the place, the most striking thing was the altar, which has an amazing painting by Titian, which Hannah says is his masterpiece. She’s usually right, too.

Some more points of interest… among the monuments in the church was this pyramid sculpture, a monument to a sculptor named Canova. Thanks to wikipedia, I just learned that his heart, but not the rest of him is buried there. There’s a picture of the pyramid, not the heart, below. There was also a strange looking thing attached to one of the walls, and when we looked at the plaque underneath it, we realized that it was a German bomb from World War II that had hit the church and not exploded. Nutty.

OK, this is just weird. While we were in Florence, we noticed that at a few of the churches they had some ‘relics’ of various saints and other figures. I had no idea what a relic was, so allow me to explain… it’s an actual part of a person’s body, usually a bone, encased in some kind of elaborate case that proudly displays the creepy thing. In most cases it was a small piece of a bone, maybe a finger or something smaller and was from a saint who was identified on the container. Some of the containers were shaped like an arm, for example, and had a little window somewhere along the length to display a little piece of bone, presumably where it actually would have been in the person’s arm. Here’s an example (it’s a tooth).

I find this all very, very strange. But what we saw in Florence paled in comparison to what we saw today at the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Click with caution.

Yes, it’s a hand. Creepy.