Travel: Bologna
Flora Neville
The church of Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna is tucked away in the Via Clavature, a short distance from the Piazza Maggiore. The façade is a dusty pink, like much of Bologna’s architecture; the colour of the sun at dusk; of smoked salmon; almost the colour of Granny’s Baedeker. The guidebook is in Italian and was written in the 1970s. Granny takes it on every one of the pilgrimages that we make to Italy and gives us readings throughout the day. She tends to leave it on trains, planes and restaurant tables, in shops and art galleries, but somehow, like a compass, it always comes back to the true North.
Early one morning on our trip, over Panettone and tea in our Airbnb apartment, Granny was scanning the Baedeker, muttering in translation. My mother was scrolling through Instagram. She was involved in an online conversation of comments with Father Julian – a priest and family friend back in London – about where to go in Bologna. He invoked the words of Elena Lavish, the patronising author in E M Forster’s A Room with a View: ‘Tut, tut! Miss Lucy! I hope we shall soon emancipate you from the Baedeker. He does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy – he does not even dream of it. The true Italy is only to be found in patient observation.’
‘What is your highlight, as you are clearly able to cut loose from Baedeker?’ my mother asked Father Julian.
‘I’m ashamed to say I haven’t been there,’ he replied. ‘Apparently one thing not to miss is the Compianto by Niccolo dell’arca in the Santa Maria della Vita. Now I’ll keep quiet; otherwise I become a talking Baedeker.’
Granny didn’t trust this fragmented string of conversation over the dark web. Nor was there any reference to this Compianto in the Baedeker. And so it was on Baedeker’s instruction that we went to the Sette Chiese in the Piazza Santo Stefano. We stopped in shops en route and spent too much on slippers, socks, tights and belts. Granny pointed out buildings by Formigine, a Bolognese, 16th-century architect with a flair for cornices and columns. After shopping, architecture is one of the principal reasons we return to Italy; Granny (Christina Terry) is a classical architect, as is her husband, Quinlan Terry. Her childhood holidays involved sketching everywhere, from Reims to Rome.
The Sette Chiese was cold and dark. ‘A fat and sinister monk’ (as Granny called him) leered around the corners, demanding euros as we shivered in the church. Granny went in search of a Roman column, my mother went to the gift shop to buy my sister a rosary and I found a fat but less sinister cat in a sunny courtyard. Baedeker led us on to the enormous church of San Petronio.
‘All this Gothic leaves me cold,’ said Granny, ‘if I were Charles V, I would find somewhere else to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor.’
We were about to give up on culture and warm up in Gucci when we came across Santa Maria della Vita, almost by accident. We slunk in through a side door and were welcomed, as if into his own home, by an Iranian man who had been studying baroque architecture in Bologna for thirty years.
Candles everywhere gave the illusion of warmth, and here there was no fat, sinister monk demanding euros in
exchange for lighting them. The church is light, bright and airy, with an elliptical dome supported by Corinthian capitals. It achieves an unlikely quality of cosiness. It is nice. But, as Elena Lavish says, ‘One doesn’t come to Italy for niceness… One comes for life.’
Life, and death, are found in the side chapel where, unbeknown to Baedeker, is the Compianto sul Cristo Morto. The composition of lifesize, terracotta characters laments the death of Christ with agonising reality. Though sculpted in the second half of the 15th-century by Niccolo dell’arca, the sculptures look like the figure in The Scream by Munch. Mary is most effective. She stands on the end, her face contorted with the very tangible and painful grief of a mother who has lost her son; her garments fixed billowing in the windless air.
After this revelation and a chalice of wine each over lunch, we were emancipated, with some conviction, from the Baedeker. And when Granny left the guidebook behind on the table, we were tempted not to go back for it at all. But it is something of a family heirloom and we returned to pick it up. Liberated as we
were, we looked around with patient observation, and Granny noted that Italian women have lost their style. Last time she was in Bologna, forty years ago, women wore neat, chic skirt-suits. Now the place is ‘awash with women in slacks and voluminous shawls down to their knees’.
Forty years ago, Granny was here with her mother, rehearsing the same, or very similar, routines to ours. They would stay a few days – somewhere dilapidated but right in the centre – and they would shop and look at frescoes and eat small portions of pasta; my greatgrandmother’s greatest fear (after ‘English maniacs’) was getting fat. She liked frescoes, Granny recalled. She liked to patiently observe the hairstyles and clothing worn by the main parts.
The best fresco in Bologna, to my great-grandmother’s taste, is in the Oratorio di Santa Cecilia on the Via Zamboni, painted in beautiful, washy, pastel colours. Greens and beige. Slightly misty. We drifted into this oratorio on our way to the Pinacoteca Nazionale art gallery, where another Bolognese Cecilia, depicted in a painting by Raphael, is
comparatively underwhelming. ‘Very bored in her ecstasy,’ Granny remarked.
Bologna was one of my greatgrandmother’s favourite Italian cities, for its arcades alone. Baedeker has it that there are 25 miles of arcaded pavement around the city. Often there are frescoes on the ceilings of the arcades, though no one looks up as they scurry through on their way to work. The pavements are marble, red and shiny, and you feel cosseted, protected, under the stone capitals and raised from the road.
My great-grandmother died when I was a year old. I never knew her. But her customs, her habits, her expressions and her aesthetic are immortalised in our family, and nowhere so much as in the places she loved to visit, Bologna especially.
And as I click through the arcades, forty years later, I can picture her here, peering at pearls in the windows of antique shops; resisting the sweet temptation of a Monte Bianco pudding, engaged in patient observation.
Easyjet flies to Bologna from Gatwick. Return flights from £55.