Letter from Bologna
/My family and I have been fortunate to spend a lot of time in Bologna over the years. Sally and I have been coming since 1980. We lived here with our young children in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. I returned for work for three summers, subsequent to our move to Portland. We have been frequent visitors over the years, both for pleasure and Portland Bologna official visits.
For the past two years, COVID forced us to cancel our travel plans, which resulted in our longest span of time away from Bologna in the last twenty-five years. We missed our city tremendously. Fortunately, this year we returned to Bologna for six-months, which started in February.
You probably realize that an old, medieval city isn’t subject to change the way a more modern urban area like on the West Coast is. There isn’t the expansion, the new building, the noticeable growth one finds in a place like Portland. Bologna is subject to very real (what might be called) limitations; physical, geographic, and historic. It has the remnants of its walls, both literally and traced by the Viale that rings the city. It is not a manifestation of a politically constructed Urban Growth Boundary.
Don’t get me wrong, Bologna has never seemed the least bit static. A fresh flush of students every year sees to that. But many of the changes you may notice are more subtle, less seen by the eye, more felt in the soul or the heart (or the stomach).
A few things I have noticed this time around, and once again this is anecdotal, not scientific:
Crosswalks have become respected! Cars now actually stop for pedestrians who are waiting to cross a street. This phenomenon is a new development. I have my theories; perhaps violators are more aggressively ticketed (although I haven’t noticed that particularly), perhaps public service announcement campaigns have worked their magic, maybe guilt and the extra time in the Confessional has finally sunk in to teach the lesson. It might be that the pandemic and its effects in Italy—slowing things down and making life more precious—has created this by-product.
The Renaissance of the Sfogline! Pasta makers have returned big time to Bologna. The small, artisanal shop had almost disappeared ten years ago. Now there seems to be a shop every couple of blocks. I have noticed this small business trend in other regards as well, but one gets the feeling that Bologna re-figured out what makes it tick: food, particularly its famous tortellini, tortellone, gramigna, etc. And since a shop like this is manageable (often by a hard-working family), popular (for both tourists and working households), and thus potentially profitable, it has been a wise business decision.
The proliferation of English speakers! The education of elementary through secondary school students, starting a little over 25 years ago has paid off in a population prepared to speak English. As someone who taught English here for over ten years, mostly to adults, I can attest to this huge shift. And, I tell you what I love; in Bologna it is seldom anything more than a courtesy. In Bologna, a person will often say, “I can speak in English if you would prefer (or need to)”. This is different than in Florence or Siena (and maybe Venice), where people (sometimes snarkily and somewhat judgmentally) use their English because commercial expediency dictates. In Bologna, it generally seems softer, less confrontational. In all honesty, it may be the constant bombardment of tourists the aforementioned cities have endured over the centuries—from the Brits of the 18th and 19th Centuries to the Americans of the 20th. Bologna is newer to the must-see itinerary of the English-speaking world. Also, English truly is the international and travel language now, and I hear Scandanavians, Germans, Eastern European, hell, even the French use it to communicate while spending time in Bologna.
Grocery stores are open on Sunday! This is not necessarily a great thing, except when you need to buy something on Sunday. For years, with the exception of a very few foreign-run stands or mini-markets, there was no option. Now, with the overtaking of the business by European and Italian supermarket chains (think Conad, COOP, Pam, Lidl, Aldi) there is no reason to not stay open. If you are running a small place, probably with your family, it was a designated time off - for church, for lunch, for the beach or mountains together. Now there are people willing to work on that day and there apparently is the need.
I could write about some other things I have noticed during this stay: the new trendy neighborhood, life during the drought, the craft beer boom, the strange penchant for Asian fusion, why restaurants have become laboratories, the Lambrusco versus Pignoletto battle, and perhaps I will at a later time. I just wanted to give you these observations, to emphasize the realization that even though time sometimes seems to move slowly, there is always some type of evolution taking place.