Another Smick Adventure: Northern Italy, February 25-March 1

Last semester I documented without even the pretense of brevity the Saint Mary's College Rome Program's group trip to Southern Italy, where we explored the Campania region with stops in Herculaneum, Pompeii, Amalfi, Paestum, Capri, Naples, and Cuma. My other ventures south of Rome were to the small city of Matera in Basilicata and, recently, to Palermo in Sicily. As I mentioned in my last post, the South has consistently been home to my favorite vacation destinations for its rich ancient culture and lively ambience. I'd spent a fair amount of time in central and northern Italy over Christmas with my family, visiting Florence, Pisa, Siena, and Venice; but each of these has its own history and vibe and makes it hard to formulate an overall view on what the "North" is generally like. I was privileged enough to experience deep south, central, and north within the span of one week, for having returned from Sicily I spent one full day in Rome before heading off with thirty of my classmates for five days in the upper stretches of the peninsula.

Our home base was the little city of Ferrara, a lasting intellectual haven with a lingering Middle-Ages aftertaste. Located in the fertile region of Emilia-Romagna in the Po River Valley, Ferrara and the surrounding area is surprisingly flat compared to the hills and mountains that dominate much of Italy. It is an appealing mix of modern and medieval, with stark brick castles from the 13th century wedged comfortably among chic shops and restaurants serving what is widely regarded as the best food in Italy. Much of the north, we were to find, followed this blueprint, though each city we visited boasted unique treasures to enjoy. It was a strange combination indeed for us to walk through a pre-Renaissance fortress on our way to visit an exhibition of Henri Matisse (a 19th/20th century French painter), but it summarized Ferrara well: a proud and beautiful heritage that hasn't keep the city so rooted in the past as to forget the recent and the contemporary. Most of the traffic on the wide cobblestone streets was by bicycle, in spite of the cold, and a large concentration of university students gave Ferrara (and the rest of the north) a fresh, updated energy that was much more familiar than the "exotic" south and much calmer than the big-city chaos of Rome.

The castle at Ferrara, with a bicyclist!

The Matisse exhibit, with all its abstract simplicity, was a delightful change of pace from the high concentration of medieval and Renaissance works we've been studying this semester, but for the next several days we didn't make it any closer to the present than the 1500s. Our first full day was spent in Mantova (English "Mantua"), the birthplace of my dear Publius Virgilius Maro (author of the Aeneid) and, like Ferrara, dominated by austere and impressive medieval towers and fortresses. We wandered the impressive aristocratic halls of the Palazzo Té, the Gonzaga family's leisurely retreat, before crossing a natural moat into the old city center. After peering uneasily up at the cage in which unhappy prisoners were once suspended from a tower, we visited a perfectly preserved Renaissance home that had once housed the now-beatified Osanna Andreasi to get a hint of what life was like five centuries ago.

You do not want to be put in that cage

Towers galore in Mantova

Mantova is sometimes called "Little Venice" for its canals

The following day we tackled the art historian's dream town of Ravenna (also the burial place of Dante Alighieri, the Italian Chaucer/Shakespeare who wrote The Divine Comedy). After visiting two beautiful early Christian churches with the same name (Sant'Apollinare) and with spectacular Byzantine mosaics, we were wowed once again by the luminous San Vitale (decorated with frescoes and mosaics) and the mausoleum of Goth queen-consort Galla Placidia with (you guessed it) more mosaics that mimicked the starry sky. Day three was a marathon of Padova (Padua) and Vicenza. In the former we toured the lively city streets, walking near the university that had educated the first ever woman college-graduate, visiting the tomb of Saint Anthony, and indulging in some fried seafood courtesy of the Veneto region in which we found ourselves. We also visited the breathtaking Scrovegni Chapel, the magnum opus of the great Renaissance painter Giotto. (To prevent deterioration due to the elements, we had to sit for twenty minutes in a special chamber that recycled air to get rid of as much dust and moisture in our clothing as possible.) We spent only a brief time in Vicenza but managed to see the easily-recognizable works of Palladio, creator of the "palladian" architectural style that heavily inspired British and American building technique, most obviously with Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello.

Dante's tomb, Ravenna

Apse mosaics at San Vitale, Ravenna

Classic Byzantine mosaic of the Emperor Justinian in San Vitale

Justinian's wife, Theodora

Mosaic ceiling in Galla Placidia's mausoleum, Ravenna

Christ as the Good Shepherd, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia

One of Padova's most colorful markets

A culinary adventure with fried seafood, Padova

Classic palladian villa near Vicenza, the inspiration for Jefferson's Monticello estate

Our final day was spent in illustrious Bologna, home to Europe's oldest university, that has maintained its college-town feel even while steeped in the sophistication of a northern medieval city. It was cold and rainy, but we managed to do the following: 1) see more medieval architecture!!!! 2) catch a glimpse of a really famous Italian guy, 3) visit another major saint's tomb (none other than Saint Dominic), 4) explore three more churches, including a really cool one from the 11th century, and 5) eat one of the best meals of our lives (more about that later). We all wished we could have stayed longer, for Bologna had a cheery elegance (that would have lent itself for some excellent shopping) and was mildly urban without the incessant traffic and tourism of Rome.

Bologna's famous two towers (cue LOTR music)

A famous guy coming out of a Bologna church! (Apparently a well-known actor and singer)

The food of this trip - of this entire part of Italy, Emilia-Romagna in particular - is almost worth its own post, but since I've already dedicated plenty to discussing the culinary superiority of the Italian culture, I'll try to limit myself to a paragraph. Simply put, it's believed that the food in this region is the best partly because the soil is the best, better for growing wheat than any other part of the country. And we all know what wheat means: pasta. Emilia-Romagna is the queen of pasta - making it, cooking it, filling it, saucing it - and also happens to be brilliant with bread, pastries, prosciutto, and cheese. (World-famous Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese comes trademarked from two cities in this region, Parma and Reggio-Emilia.) Bologna, capital of the region, is also known as the food capital of the country, churning out hearty Emilian specialties of ragù (meat sauce), tortellini, lasagne, and tagliatelle like popcorn. Ferrara and Mantova are famous for their cappellacci con zucca - jumbo tortellini filled with pumpkin and usually topped with either ragù or butter and sage; but the towns are distinguishable even from each other by the fact that Mantovan cooks will crumble sweet almond biscotti into the pumpkin filling. Such good food surely inspires a spirit of limitless camaraderie; we befriended our waitress Oksana, a young Russian woman who was thrilled that we were from the United States, and even went back to leave her a note on our last night in Ferrara. Celebrating our friend Maddie's birthday could not have come in a more delicious collection of cities; add that to the fact that it was Carnevale time when pastry chefs were busy baking lots of seasonal specialties, and we were in the region at one of the best food times we could have hoped for.

Cappellacci con zucca al ragù, Ferrara

Cappellacci con zucca al burro e salvia, Mantova
(These were extra sweet from the crumbled cookies inside)

Torta di tagliatelle, Ferrara (yes, that is dried pasta on top of a chocolate torte!)

The best lasagne of my life (with the famous ragù meat sauce), Bologna

Beyond the food and the monuments, however, the reserved refinement of Northern Italy was a lovely contrast with the spicy southern weekend I'd enjoyed previously. The people were as friendly and welcoming as their Sicilian counterparts but with a poise that reminded me more of Western Europe than of the Mediterranean. It was still definitively Italian, mind you, just a little more tame than Rome or Sicily or Naples. It was a breath of familiarity, a step closer to the current, collegiate world we'd left behind, less stuccoed and marbled and more bricked and paved. To pick between North and South just isn't feasible, so the closest I can say is this: I could see myself living in the North the way I couldn't in the South, but for a vacation, an adventure, and a blast, I'd hop on the next train southward.

The contrast between North and South also once again signals just how vital Italy has been to the history of the Western world. It was the seat of ancient civilization, the skeleton of which still stands in Rome's monuments and the ruins that dot the southern half of the country. But it was also massively important to the modern world, playing a central role in the artistic and political developments of the Middle Ages and being the people to lead the way into the Renaissance, which set the world on track to where it is today. Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, and Augustus - the titans of the ancient world at whom we still marvel today - were the predecessors of Dante, Galileo, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Machiavelli: all Italians, all transformative in the history of civilization. So in another way, heading northward is like heading forward, leaving the political and religious primacy found in Rome for the intellectual and creative dominance of cities like Florence, Bologna, Padova, and Pisa.

Where else but here?

With our hostess and new friend Oksana, Ferrara