Edward Hutton: Bologna

 Edward Hutton published The Cities of Romagna and the Marches in 1925 shortly after the conclusion of World War I, then know as the Great War. The cities and towns he visited seemed hardly effected by the War. He started in Ravenna and ended in Urbino. This first post records his change of mind about Bologna.*

I had been in Bologna  many times and had never really liked this somber and learned city, with its gloomy arcaded streets and grotesque leaning towers, its sober brown churches, its gallery full of late pictures, its general air of disillusion, when circumstances compelled me spend a month there, and it was only then I discovered, not without astonishment, that I had never really understood  Bologna at all—how essentially charming she is, how cool and delightful those arcaded streets, how glowing those numberless churches, where the people worship with so simple an earnestness,  how beautiful her environment, that countryside neither of the plains nor of the mountains, among the foothills of the Apennines.

And certainly my experience is not unique. Very many travelers, I think, have felt much the same disappointment in Bologna, nor is it strange perhaps that this should be so. For the most part we come to this sober university town from all the dancing light and colour of Venice, from the sheer beauty of Florence, or from the inexhaustible interest and strength of Milan, and we feel that Bologna beside them is insipid and without a character of her own, a place to which one can only be indifferent.

But, indeed, if approached in the right way, Bologna may be loved at once, and without an afterthought. Only to come to her directly, with the best of all in your heart, is too hard a test. Let the traveler who would understand her great delight come to her not from Venice or Florence, but from the cities of the plain, from Ferrara, or best of all along the great Roman road, the Via Emilia, from Picenza, through Parma, Reggio and Modena; only then can he truly appreciate her dry superiority and that strange beauty of hers which is neither of the plain nor of the mountains, but of the marriage here made between them. (61-62) …

The Towers

…the strangest sight in Bologna, the Leaning Towers in the Piazza di Porta Ravagnana… why these towers were built, and more especially why they lean, whether this be accidental or of set purpose, we do not know. As of everything else in Italy that was notable and strange, Dante has spoken of these towers also. …

these strange towers, which stand within twenty feet of one another in the small Piazza where seven ways meet, leave a more lasting impression on the mind than anything else in the city. (81)

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The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.