Talk:Bologna

Unsourced

I went to Bologna on the trail of Stendhaliane days and I lost myself, with my heart squeezed like a sensitive hazelnut in her shell, in the itineraries of Dino Campana. If I had been a poet instead of a bourgeois on the road to disappointment, that would have been the time to write some poems. I left Florence around midday and an hour later I was in Bologna. I wandered around all the streets and when I couldn't stand it anymore due to tiredness, I went to the station and took the first train to Florence: this also happened at two or three in the morning. The strangeness was this: that being in Florence, I ignored Florence and got to know Bologna. (Antonio Delfini)
Beautiful and sweet Bologna! I spent seven years there, perhaps the most beautiful... (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Bologna loves basketball and lives on basketball. (Miloš Teodosić)
Bologna is a basketball city. Of course the results unleash the enthusiasm of the fans and lead to large crowds. But in Bologna, when the fuse is lit, the city responds. Not many cities can boast their passion and interest in basketball. it is at the same level as football, even when the football team is an established first division team. It's not a normal situation. (Sergio Scariolo)
Bologna was beautiful, lovable, worthy of being enjoyed with soul and flesh. Behind the bright windows of the Zanichelli bookshop the eternally angry spirit of Carducci still hovered. (Rino Alessi)
Bologna, the learned by way of speaking and the fat by way of doing, has always been the most suitable city for the development of my caricaturistic instincts. The jokes, witticisms or even satires of the Bolognese have a special flavor, the flavor of dry tagliatelle, tortellini and mortadella; that is, they are the fruits of healthy minds in healthy bodies. Gall and poison only rarely enter or exit Bolognese mouths; but only that little bit of mischief and biting without which satire would no longer exist. (Augusto Majani)
Bologna maintains mysteries and has its own very metaphysical atmosphere despite being an earthly city. I think it is a city that lends itself very well to noir also because all the kilometers of porticoes on one side protect you from the sun and rain but also risk taking away the sky, the horizon, they are suffocating, claustrophobic and protective. The Certosa, the cemetery, is the most open place in Bologna, from there you see everything, the plain, the hills. Even Lord Byron passing through Bologna said that the Certosa was the most open place in Bologna. (Grazia Verasani)
Bolognesi are that acute and wise good-naturedness of ethical judgments, that balanced complacency of spiritual and material joys, that predominance of common sense over all the surprises of enthusiasm, that peaceful and very optimistic wit that comments on sins without wanting to kill sinners . Bolognese is that abundance of doctrine and wisdom, which does not prevent, at the right moment, from appreciating the merits of a delicious lunch or a seductive woman. (Luigi Federzoni)
How rich Bologna is! ^[sic] plunged my greedy eyes into the night of this city that seduces me as much as Genoa subjugates me. Changing shop windows, women who become unreal in the fog that fades and softens everything. (Camillo Sbarbaro)
Bologna is one of the main cities of Italy and, as they say, of the first compass, full of people, arts and riches, and abundant in all things belonging to human life. In the city there are beautiful streets with very superb palaces, of which you can see some entrances more suitable for castles of princes than for palaces of private gentlemen. They are beautiful and large churches; the main one, which is on the square, is dedicated to S. Petronio, master and protector of the city. It is located on a flat surface under the coast of some hills, on one of which there is a rich monastery, the Church of S. Michele del Bosco, from where you can clearly see the whole city, which is square in shape, if indeed it is not square. (Andrea Minucci)
Bologna was already the head of the 12 cities that the Tuscans possessed beyond the Apennines, which having been driven out by the Gauls, and then the Gauls by the Romans, was made a colony, having brought three thousand men to live there. After the Romans it was subject to the Greeks, the Lombards, and the Exarchate of Ravenna. Then it became free, as did the other cities of Lombardy, at which time the cursed actions of the Lambertazzi and the Geremei arose, who ultimately led it to great poverty and servitude. Therefore, due to many hardships, they recommended themselves to the Roman Pontiff. Then the Pepolis, Visconti, Bentivogli, and finally they were reduced under the shadow of the same Pope, who now holds it in peace. (Franz Schott)
Walking around a little further I met | one who was lost, | I told him that in the center of Bologna | not a single child is lost, | he looks at me with a slightly distorted face | and he tells me "I'm from Berlin". (Lucio Dalla)
The fact is that Bologna wants to be a modern city: women are invited home to have a free mammogram by booking on the site; but then it's a twentieth century city, and the site doesn't work, and the ladies who answer the switchboard [...] sigh like someone whose son is stupid: they know it, but what can they do. It's not necessarily a bad thing, being a twentieth century city. The mayor campaigns by talking about what he will do for music, as if it were the "Vote Your Voice" city that it was when I was eight years old. Glovo in the morning is desolately empty of offers: the person from Bologna doesn't order eggs delivered to his home, he lives in a province of the twentieth century, not in Santa Monica (where the person from Milan, who has had the wrong songwriters and ignores the grace and the boredom of living in the province). [...] At Lumière, the film club where I went to see Truffaut when I was sixteen, tonight and tomorrow they are making Night Effect: everything has remained still. Bologna is the answer to Michele Apicella: it's not always true that the snacks from when we were children will never come back, sometimes there are endless supplies of snacks. Being a twentieth-century city is fine, even if the people of Bologna map the open-open bins just as the Milanese map the bars where you can charge your cell phone. [...] Being a twentieth century city is not serious. It becomes so when, if you talk about the delirium of rubbish with someone in the sector, he replies cheerfully: but we have the Il Rifiutologo app, exclamatory points. I had never heard of anything so Milanese, so Instagram-era, so Roman-sounding: they don't know how to collect rubbish, but they have the app. Bologna, you know: I really miss the tea of the twentieth century. (Guia Soncini)
Its Municipal Theater is among the best in Italy for its opera seasons of the highest level and for having created around itself the first large Wagnerian audience on the peninsula. (Chino Alessi)
In Bologna the best sausages ever eaten are made; they are eaten raw, they are eaten cooked, and at all hours they whet the appetite. (Ortensio Lando)
[...] in that church dedicated to the protomartyr, of such modest appearance on the outside (half sunk into the ground it seems to sprout like a wild flower), familiar and strange, intimately rich but collected without grandeur, all the seeds of developments rear hatch in peaceful coexistence confident in the future. It already contains that fusion of the most disparate elements, so that the entire city reaches the present day perfectly assimilating every influence and gift of the times in its original stone face. Because Bologna is above all stone, architecture: it even avoids the lure of a river so as not to deviate from its astral geometry in games of ephemeral reflections. And from the Apennines (^[sic] every mountain is already an architectural sketch) seems only to welcome the invitation to model the formless, to transport the possible figures from the sleep of immobile matter into the human reality of a new nature, defined, organised. (Leo Traverso)
The "fat" Bologna, as it is defined in a sarcastic vein, is certainly such due to the wealth, the abundance and the enjoyment spirit of its people. But it is also a center of great culture, of elegance, of a beautiful lifestyle, of global university value. (Chino Alessi)
The "fat Bologna" was anything but the maze-like convent world that Ugo Foscolo had perhaps seen in a moment of bad mood. (Rino Alessi)
The big dates in Bologna were the «premieres» of the opera season at the Teatro Comunale, in autumn (the Bolognese public boasted, rightly, Wagnerian after a famous premiere of the direct Lohengrin by Angelo Mariani) and at carnival, the «flower ball». (Rino Alessi)
Now who will first raise the cry from Italy? breaking the various, infamous, ancient brake? | Of martyrs and heroes famous nest, | you Modena and Bologna. Oh the clear day || of grown freedoms, haughty souls | between the bloody stocks and the grim exiles | and the horrendous martyrs in black prisons, || you neither Germans nor papal claws | who will ever give more than a will? gathers her children at the end of the great mother? (Giosuè Carducci)
To then finish talking to you about Bologna, I will say that people lived there then and still live cheerfully, lavishly, with great facilities of good friendships and festive gatherings. The city gives its hand to the villa and the villa to the city: beautiful houses, beautiful gardens, and great comforts without the strains of that provincial luxury that says: «respect me because I cost too much and must last a long time!...» (Ippolito Nievo )
A few years ago I returned to Bologna. I left her at the age of two and it was as if I was seeing her for the first time. I was twelve years old at the time, but I was unable to discover the beauties praised by my parents. A gray sky clouded that day in Bologna. People invaded porches and streets, noisy, yet quiet, safe. I had imagined otherwise. A city of utopia, a carefree and happy country, where money flows freely, theater is found at every step, operetta music comes from every café. The people, always a little tipsy, dance under triumphs of mortadella. I thought disappointedly: – Was I born here? In this gray building? In these damp streets that I saw in my imagination watered with wine? (Michele Valori)
If the noble Cities used to give gifts to the poets, what could Bologna have ever given to the extreme Homeris if not the head of Athena Lemnia? (Gabriele D'Annunzio)
When I was a councilor in Bologna, in the early seventies, I fought to prevent dozens and dozens of banks from setting up where there were shops and shops. They called me crazy. Now the banks have also left and supermarkets and clothing stores have arrived. And above all restaurants. (Pier Luigi Cervellati)
What you call Bologna is a big thing, which goes from Parma to Cattolica [...] where people actually live in Modena, work in Bologna and in the evening go dancing in Rimini [...] it is a strange metropolis [...] that spreads like wildfire between the sea and the Apennines. (Carlo Lucarelli)
I think back to Bologna, to the past three days, they seem to me to be an oasis of sun and a more intense higher life that will leave its mark on me for the rest of my life. And then I like Bologna, with its porticoes, its beautiful red-dark buildings, its beautiful vast squares, its imposing San Petronio, its lively but not businesslike movement, movement of cheerful people who crowd everywhere to see and be to see, to enjoy life. – I like the broad and sincere friendliness of the people, I like teeming public places, full of light and warmth, and finally and most of all I like their opulent women, radiant with life, who smile at the smile, who it seems they all look at each other... (Carlo Michelstaedter)
Satied and desperate. (Giacomo Biffi)
If Padua is the city of porticoes and arches then I don't know how to define Bologna: Except that here each arch is as high as a two-storey house in our country, in the center a portal leads to an atrium surrounded by columns, in which there could be a respectable station, and the atrium with another portal opens onto the courtyard. It is an absolute madness of columns and arches; all the buildings are properly palaces with colonnades; all the streets, almost the whole city, are made up of only buildings, and where the poorest neighborhoods are, there are always only arches on the street and courtyard, loggias, porticoes, all in a heavy Renaissance style. It is a sumptuous and somewhat cold city; his glory is not in art, but in science and money. (Karel Čapek)
We used to say "fat Bologna" wanting to allude more than to the weight of the inhabitants, to their carnality, their love for good food and the healthy physiological consequences of this love. (Rino Alessi)
The dark turreted Bologna rises in the clear winter, | and the hill above white with snow laughs. (Giosuè Carducci)
Vigna, in my courtyard a fig is black | the tailor tree of the great father Adam: | I lunch in the shade of his branches and say: | – old Bologna, I love you! (Olindo Guerrini)

Francesco Guccini

Bologna is an Emilian woman with strong cheekbones, | Bologna capable of love, capable of death, | who knows what matters and what is worth, who knows where the salt sauce is, | who calculates life correctly and who knows how to stand up no matter how affected...
Bologna is a rich lady who was a farmer: | well-being, villas, jewels... and salamis on display, | who knows that the smell of misery to swallow is a serious thing | and she wants to feel safe with what she has on, because she knows fear.
Bologna is a strange lady, a vulgar matron, | Bologna, a good girl, Bologna "busona", | Bologna, the center of everything, you push me to sob and burp | remorse for what you gave me which is almost a memory, smelling of the past....
Bologna is an old lady with slightly soft hips, | with her breasts on the Po plain and her ass on the hills, | Arrogant and papal Bologna, red and fetal Bologna, | Bologna, the fat and the human, already a little Romagna and with the smell of Tuscany...
Bologna is provincial for me, Paris is minor.