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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!