la bellezza di una moglie

(The next few posts are excerpts from a long email to Katy responding to her question- how is school going for me.)

School has been interesting so far- It took me a couple of days to get used to Bologna, but I'm starting to see her finer points. I say 'her' in part because città is feminine (like in French) but also because on my first day of class , the director of the school told us all that Bologna doesn't have the beauty of a movie star like Rome and Florence and Venice, but more like the beauty of an old wife. And it's true that Bologna doesn't have fancy monuments or many open plazas, and virtually no parks in the centro storico- this is mostly due to the fact that Bologna's layout hasn't changed much since medieval times when people just didn't have time for hanging out in parks.   When you come here you will notice that nearly all the sidewalks are covered by arcades (which I'm sure will be nice in the rain, and already offer much-appreciated shade from the still-scorching heat) and the fact that the entire town is BRICK RED! I'm pretty sure that there is a law in town that you have to paint your building some shade of brick red and that you MUST use brick red shutters, shades, or curtains in your windows. At first I thought this was a missed opportunity for something much more lovely, but now I'm noticing small differences between buildings and seeing interesting little decorative touches that betray the city's interesting past- it's kind of like going into a forest and saying at first 'bleah, look at all this green! How about a little neon here or there for a change' and then after a while of looking, seeing all the amazing but sometimes subtle diversity all around you- certainly prettier than you could have imagined. Size-wise for your reference, the city seems to be a little bigger than Tours, but nowhere near the size of Paris. The university is the huge here and it is the oldest in the western world (1088).

(all the pictures here are taken in Bologna within a block of my school, the last two in piazza Santo Stefano)