Weekend in Bologna & Parma - Days 10, 11

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DAY 10 - Saturday
The group has the weekend off from any planned activities or classes and most of the students are going site seeing in other cities. We're going to stick close by and take some time to be by ourselves. Most days we run into someone from our group, on the street or at the hotel. And most days we end up joining someone or multiple someones for dinner, beers at a bar or wine in the lobby. Both of us need some down time in life, to be away from people and in our own private bubble.
Saturday morning, sleeping in, there's nothing better! The sun is shining, it's perfectly warm outside and perfectly gorgeous. The air in Parma always smells like green things and vegetation, it's wonderful. Must be because of all the open land and farms in the area. Parma is one of nine provinces in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy which is well known for intensive agriculture, food and wine.
Garibaldi square, which is very close to our hotel, has a handful of restaurants and we ate at each one of them multiple times during our stay. Today we picked one of them and had a lovely late breakfast of crepes and coffee while sitting in the sun and people watching. Parma is busy on Saturdays! Marleah had nutella crepes with whipped cream and John had a ham and cheese crepe. Divine! For some reason, whenever we eat at this place there are a million bees that hover all around and land on our food, fly by our faces and hang out on the table. So many bees!! What the??
Even though we want to hang around our room and do nothing all day we decide not to waste our precious vacation time. We leisurely strolled over to the train station, stood in line for ages for train tickets and took a trip to Bologna to see some sights.
Upon arrival in Bologna we realized we didn't have a map and didn't look at a map before we left. We can't use our phones without wi-fi because the rates are too expensive, we need to research the places we want to go before we leave the hotel. Usually, we have those cute little tourist city center maps, hotels always have them. Since we're not staying in Bologna we don't have one and we don't know where to get one. John knew the general direction we needed to go, we went down some wrong streets, had to backtrack a couple times but eventually we made it to the old part of the city, the city center. John has that special homing pigeon capability and direction instinct so we always get where we need to be. Marleah has the opposite problem and if her instinct is to go a certain direction you can bet that the other way is right. We always go the way John suggests! Always!
The city center is mobbed with people, thousands of people. There are protests and riot cops, tourists and weekend activities. There is also a Catholic fair happening and it's so crowded. We tried to find a place to eat but restaurants don't open until dinner time and the cafes and gelato places don't serve real meals and that's what we want. Instead we went sight-seeing and we'll eat later, walking around when you're hungry and tired and can't find a place to eat leads to crankiness and irritability. We don't want to do that to each other. Our destination is the Archiginnasio which was once the main University of Bologna from 1563 until 1803. It is the oldest University in the world. The open courtyard, hallways, stairwells, all the walls in the building are covered with painted or sculpted coat of arms, one for each student who attended. The main reason for our visit is to see the Teatro Anatomico, the Anatomy Theater built in 1637. Here, corpses were dissected for the first scientific studies of the human body. It is set up like an amphitheater with the dissection table in the middle of the room, there are carvings all around the room of doctors and physicians, the coffer ceiling has a carving of Apollo surrounded by constellations and there is an ornate seat for the professor with a canopy being held up by carvings of skinless men, "gli spellati" (the skinned ones). The entire room, floor to ceiling, is made out of fir wood. It's gorgeous!
We stopped in the library before we left, it houses important historical, cultural, philosophical, political, literary, artistic, biographical bibliographical texts. Approximately 800,000 books pamphlets, 2,500 incunabula, 15,000 sixteenth-century books, 12,000 manuscripts, 50,000 letters and 15,000 drawings and designs. It's a very important city library and the largest civic library in Emilia-Romagna! Back to Parma just in time for dinner. We ate at this super cute place, the bar and pizza oven is all along one wall and it looks like a huge sailboat! The lights hanging on the ceiling are oars! The food was really really delicious, John had a Pizza Margherita and Marleah had Capellini in Brodo (little hats filled with meat in broth). Sooooooo gooooood!!!!!
Today was a good day. We went to interesting places, we're worn out and full from a great dinner, we're together. We don't think you can ask for more.

DAY 11 - Sunday
Today is going to be the day of hanging around the room and not having places to go or having any plans.
The amount of gluten we eat every single day is really catching up to us making us feel ill and Marleah has bad cramps. Also, we're very worn out and feeling drained. Sometimes on
vacation you need to take some time for yourself, some time to
charge back up. No need to run run run all the time. John took a quick trip to the grocery store for a water/snack restock.
Our day was full of naps, TV, baths, reading and mostly a whole bunch of wonderful nothinnnnnnng!

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