Italy 2026 – Bologna & Casazza

We took Trenitalia from Florence to Bologna. We came out of the wrong side of the station and had to walk a bit over a bridge with the luggage but it wasn’t too far to the hotel. The Portici hotel was a bit better from the Florence hotel and definitely a step up from Rome’s.

We had breakfast in the hotel. It was a really nice European breakfast. It was in a big room, kind of an old ballroom and there was an outdoor patio area overlooking the steet and a neglected park. Bologna if famous for it’s long arched walkway, so we walked over to that. In the heat though the distance was a bit much and we didn’t have much energy left to climb up the arches and walked back to the hotel. That night we walked down to one of the restaurant alleys near the piazza. We had a delicious ragu and some pizza. That night we walked back down to the piazza where they had a free public movie, 3 Days of the Condor. It was interesting watching the old Robert Redford / Faye Dunaway movie in the Italian crowd. It had a nice vibe, like hanging out with the locals rather than the tourists.

In the morning, after another yummy hotel breakfast we walked over to Hertz to pick up a car. A Fiat keeping with the Italian theme. It was about 2-2.5 hrs to Casazza. The highway roads are a bit narrower than the US. We couldn’t figure out how the toll booth worked and didn’t get a ticket entering the tollroad, so when we exited we had to talk with a person in the booth to pay. But we made it. We walked around Casazza. We took a picture by the town sign. We walked by the city hall and the church that we went to back in 2002. Then we found the same overlook on the hill overlooking town. There wasn’t much else to do and we headed back to Bologna. Jeff fought the jetlag sleepies for the first part of the drive and again we managed to miss the booth to get the ticket but we made it back in one piece. We unsuccessfully tried to fill the car up before returning.

We ate dinner at the hotel which had a very good restaurant. It didn’t open until 7:30, so we ordered a pizza and ate slowly until we could order from the main menu. It was worth the wait and turned out to be one of the best meals of the trip, including the Zucchini gnocchi. Afterwards the kids walked to get gelato.

In the morning, we took a taxi to the top of the arches walkway to the Madonna of San Lucca. It was a nice vista at the top and walking down the covered arches was way easier than the previous days attempt up in the heat. We had some gelato at the bottom and visited the cat we saw the yesterday. We took our fist bus to a food area near the train station. It was a bit of a tourist trap, and the pizza was pretty mid. Our attention was on the many Carabinieri that had surrounded a guy with a bicycle. We never did figure out what the scene was about.

At some point some new nicknames came about. Somehow Jeff demoted to ameba, a single celled organzism; in addition to duomo. And of course Kate’s critically important advise. “A man with no pants fears not the pick pocket”