Luca perfume poison5/18/2023 Look inwards, and nondescript wooden doors will reveal themselves as the entrances to a florid church, a museum or a frescoed cafe. Look up, and you’ll see medieval beams propping up buildings and looming brick towers - the skyscrapers that made this a medieval Manhattan. The centre is a web of medieval streets, knitted together by 25 miles of porticoes (some frescoed, others mosaic-floored, all a respite from the humidity). While they’re widely used today, those nicknames are longstanding because within the ancient city walls, Bologna’s present is also its past. Tortellini, lasagne, tortelloni, ragu - Bologna is the epicentre of them all. This is a place where plates arrive heaving with pasta hand-rolled that morning, drowned in parmesan where tagliatelle is fried and dusted with sugar for a wintry treat where ham hocks dangle from shop ceilings, wheels of cheese are stacked by the till and frothy Lambrusco is quaffed by the litre as a palate-cleanser for all that grease. And it’s not only Italy’s food capital Bologna is the world capital of what we call Italian food. To this day, it’s Italy’s left-wing bastion, held firm by Europe’s oldest university. Stereotypes they may be, but Bologna’s nicknames are on the money. This article was adapted from National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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