Just 30 km away is Bologna, the capital of the metropolitan city and of the Emilia Romagna region, located between the mountains of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines and the heart of the Po Valley.
Bologna the learned, Bologna the fat, Bologna the red, Bologna the turreted. The capital of Emilia Romagna does not have one face, it has at least four. Learned because the oldest university in the Western world was born within its walls, the Alma Mater studiorum: the date of its foundation was conventionally set in the year 1088 (and the commission that established it also included the poet Giosuè Carducci, who was a teacher of that university). Fat because, everyone knows, in Bologna you eat well (tortellini, ragù and mortadella have now entered the world culinary imagination). Red for the color that the roofs and houses have given to the city since the Middle Ages. Finally, turrita, an ancient name that refers to when a hundred towers stood over the city. Two have become its symbol and to find the other twenty or so survivors it is necessary to look carefully, perhaps by sticking one’s head out of one of the arcades (38 km long) that embrace and intersect the entire historic center.
