Northern Tour- Day 4

After spending the night in a nice hotel in Bologna, we eat breakfast in the hotel before setting out for the day. For the record, this hotel has the BEST hot chocolate I have ever had. When I asked for it, they brought me a small pitcher full (about 3 or 4 full servings worth) of a thick, rich and creamy hot chocolate that tasted like they had just melted a fine semi-sweet chocolate bar and whipped it together with some cream for just the perfect amount of richness, but enough of that.

Bologna is perhaps the most "Americanized" urban cities that I have seen in Italy thus far. This is largely due to the fact that it is, in large part, a college town. Bologna University, with a student population of around 30,000, is actually the oldest university in the western world.                             (above) The leaning tower of Bologna 

It was officially founded in the year 1088, which just astounds me when I think about how Columbus didn't even discover the Americas until a few hundred years later. But despite it's age, it really just feels like any other typical college town anywhere. During the tour we stop in to see the University's Museo di Anatomia Umana Normale, which is an anatomical museum of wax pieces made in the 18th and 19th centuries, a large part of which is dedicated to the study of baby delivery, which was the first of its kind and highly advanced for its time.

After a visit to the Giorgio Morandi museum, we head over to Le Corbusier's Pavillion de L'esprit Nouveau (the New Spirit), built for the Exposition des Art Decoratifs held in Paris in 1925, but torn down the following year. In Bologna they have built a faithful replica based on the original plans in 1977 for the use of study by architecture and design students. It is an exhibitional building: a standardized housing project designed according to Corbu's "purest" manifesto which shapes social habits and philosophy of living spaces rather than following previous social models. While I don't agree with Corbu's "ideal" living standards, and shudder to think of how horrible it would be if he had been able to carry out his plans for an "ideal" city (think of those massive standardized housing projects built in communist Russia), I still appreciate his design skills in being able to build a very inexpensive house made completely out of cement, but still with open spaces which are opened up to the outside world and have a lot of natural sunlight filtering through. My favorite part of the house is a very small outdoor pavilion that has a tree growing in the middle of it, which is poking through a large hole in the cement roof of the pavilion. The only thing I would have changed about this space is to have grown some grass in the ground instead of putting in the cement tiles it has now.

Once again we get back on the bus and head out on a 3 hour plus journey, crossing the Appennine chain again, and enter a small region called Liguria, situated in the narrow strip of land between the mountains and the Mediterranean Sea. Traveling along the "Riviera di Levante," a road that was rediscovered by English travelers, such as the poet P.B. Shelley, I find myself amongst a beautiful landscape, ever changing and never getting old, mountains and hills on my right, coast and sea to my left.

Finally we reach our destination, Varazze, a small, quite coastal town where we will be lodging for the next two nights. After dinner I head outside for a stroll in the cool sea air. Though it is only 9:30 by my watch, the sky is already pitch-black and I only see a couple of other people out and about. The beach is completely deserted, but the moon and the few buildings in town that still have their lights on give me just enough light to walk by, so I go and climb out along this boulder jetty jutting out into the ocean. Shrouded in the darkness, I stand there in quite solitude, absorbing everything around me and contemplating on all the things that had passed before my eyes in the last couple of days. I thank God especially for all the blessings of this life. For being with me everywhere I go, and I pray that He help me to grow in wisdom, understanding, humility, grace and above all, love. Love for friends and enemies alike, love for family and love for strangers on the street. It is love which connects us all and binds us together with a chain 10 times stronger than any act of hate could ever be. Through this love I can feel the presence of all my family and friends standing behind me, keeping me company in this cold, dark landscape in an unwavering wave of love and support. Looking out into the darkness at the vast ocean in front of me, I too am reaching out my hand to all my loved ones back home, sending out all my love and happiness across the seas to reach you, wherever you may be.