Today, we started our day at 9:30. The woman offers breakfast to us between 8 and 10 so we each took fast showers and then had some breakfast. Matt had drama class at 11, so we left to walk over there. Though we had walked around the area last night, it was much nicer to be able to see everything with some sun on it.
As I learned today, Bologna is famous for three reasons. Firstly, it is the place where tortellini was created. Secondly, the city contains thousands of porticos. For those who do not study architecture, a portico is a porch supported by arches. All of the porticos are connected in Bologna so all of the sidewaIks are covered and you can walk from place to place without getting wet. Bologna is home to the worldest longest portico, but more about that later. The third reason why it is famous is because of the 300,000 people who live here, 100,000 are college students.
When Matt left for his theater class, I began to wander around the Plaza Maggiore, the city's central square. They had put up a 40 ft Christmas tree in the middle of it today but it was rather ugly undecorated. There is a famous statue of Neptune in the square as well as a huge Basilica and the public library. I walked down some of the side streets and visited a book store. I also stumbled upon an ancient university for physicians, now a library, and an anthropological museum. The museum had a ton of Egyptian items in the basement, including sarcophagi and mummies, plaster casts on the first floor of many famous Greek and roman statues, and on the second floor, tens of thousands of artifacts from Bologna's history between the prehistoric and Gallic eras (when occupied by the Gauls, or Germanic tribes, after the fall of the Roman empire). The highlight for me was a visiting exhibit about the history of counterfeiting currency called Il Vero e Il Falso. It was sponsored by the Italian Guardia di Finanza and covered 2500 years of counterfeiting. They had set up huge displays of currencies with their counterfeit copies right next to them.
Later I met up with Matt after his class and we took a taxi up to the monastery of San Luca that looks over the city. The bad news was that it was raining, the monastery was closed, and so was the pizza restaurant at the top. The good news was that we walked down from there in the worlds longest Portico. It measures over 2 miles and has 666 arches. We had a delicious lunch at a restaurant near arch 44. Afterwards we visited the basilica. It was massive. We walked around Bologna for a bit in the rain and visited a place called San Sebastien (maybe?) that had seven churches all crammed together and connected to one another. After we went back to the apartment to rest.
For dinner, we walked back to the center of town and met two of Matt's friends for apertivi and dinner. Apertivi is this cool thing Italians do where you pay for one drink (like 6 Euros) and then you pay a Euro or two more for access to a buffet of appetizers. The place we went had at least 9 different dishes including couscous, two pastas, and some salads. You hang out for an hour and then go get dinner. We went to a different restaurant for dinner where I had some tasty lasagna and we drank some wine. After an hour and a half of dinner, we traversed the city for good gelato and then traversed the city again to go to a bar. Although the city was kind of dead (it was Tuesday) it was fun to be in the bar. All the places we went to tonight were playing a channel called mydeejay which was incredible because it was a commercial-free music video station that seemed to only play good music. Afterwards, we went home and got in bed by 11:30.
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