WALKING

My professor Owen Shapiro said something to me during the first days of our trip, something to the account of, "New York City is the only place in America where you can live like a European." It's not the food, not the architecture or the people. It's the walking. In New York, you can walk anywhere. In Bologna, you have to walk everywhere, and man do we walk. Calculating the distances between the Cineteca, the theaters, the Piazza Maggiore, and the Foresteria Guest House, we have been walking up to four miles everyday. It's an Italian fact of life that has its up's and down's, but needless to say, you need a sturdy pair to get around everyday (of legs, that is). It's a routine that has become fondly annoying. First down Via Sacco and up the endless stairs towards  Via Stalingrado. Then across the shadeless bridge, a mad dash to Via Mascarella and the protection of the famed porticoes. Right at Irnerio, left at Marconi after a half mile, shortcut through the backstreets of Leopardi... On and on and on. A partially air-conditioned theater is our reward, and dropping a euro on a bottle of water is usually a welcomed expense. The trek is a long one, and after a few days of traversing the streets in Saharan temperatures, it can easily become a chore. If you want it to. But it seems to me that something we may take advantage of everyday could in fact be our best opportunity to learn. 

Almost there......

Beauties lie behind every corner of every street, wonders of culture and architecture that we don't have in America. Bologna is a medieval city of the old and the new; streets, buildings, food, and people of the past and the present. In a rush to escape the heat or make it on time to a screening, it's so easy to pass everything up. Despite the formality of the route, things change everyday, and everyday it's a new opportunity to observe and absorb. The physical aura of Bologna is something that I think Americans and even the Italians simply become accustomed to. And thus ignore. Naturally, it's something that every person does after they've been in one place for an amount of time. But sometimes situations can force us to do otherwise. 

Via Indipendenza

One of my biggest fears coming in was my ankles, two things that have hindered me greatly over the past few years. As my Italian friend Vittorio so eloquently put it, "You play, they twist. You walk, they twist. You live. They break." Hard to escape a pair of weak ankles. And in a city where everything depends on one's ability to mobilize, the irony seemed inevitable. And wouldn't you know it... A week and a half in, playing frisbee with the local kids, hearing their "ooo's" and their "aah's", I decided to get fancy. I went for a miraculous, soaring catch, and mid-flight I saw it coming. A ditch. My left ankle. Lacking my brace. Not a good equation. Crack. I had suffered worse before, but knowing that I had miles and miles to walk in the next few days was not comforting. The next day, I dragged my swollen leg out of bed an hour early and started to walk. It was pretty painful, the stairs and the bridge were the worst. What would have usually taken me 40 minutes took me close to an hour and a half. But despite the pain, and the heat, I didn't completely regret not taking a cab. You'd think that no Italian had ever seen an American with a limp before. Every person who passed me paused to gawk, first at my leg, then at my face. So, I decided to look away, and in doing so I began to see small details of the city that I may have never stopped to notice. Each arcade has a unique design, each column a different pattern. A pigeon's nest in a portico doorway. A small church in a seemingly abandoned side alley. My findings that day weren't life-changing, but they were significant, significant enough to take my focus off my pain and onto ancient city that I so non-chalantly walk through everyday. It's in the small moments like these that you can stop and say to yourself, "Wow. I'm in Italy right now. Holy shit." Walking can be a chore, or it can be that "you-time" that every person needs.