Dazzling Dozza

Our next stop was decided purely by its location - it was situated sort of in the middle of three sites we were interested in - Bologna, Ravenna, and Ferrara.  The place we stayed at wasn't fancy-it was a newish apartment but it had no air-con and the temps were still in the high 30s and it was just off of a 24hr busy road, so sleeping with the windows open was not really an option.  Lea loved it.

But just a couple of kilometres away was the little old town of Dozza (the owners of the apartment put us on to it, otherwise we'd be none the wiser).  By now we'd seen a lot of historic old towns but this one was unique in that the walls were swathed with murals.  There were some gorgeous restaurants there with great views and food.  Dozza turned out to be a real gem!

Ravenna is famous for its mosaics.  We didn't quite make it into the town of Ravenna itself, however on the outskirts is a fantastic basilica - Basilica di Sant'Apollinare in Classe - which apparently has some of the best mosaics.  We weren't going to argue..

The apse is totally covered by a stunning display of mosaics...

 

Above the marble columns and arches are cameos of all the archbishops of Ravenna.  Just one of them looked to have a foo looking over it...

On asking one of the basilica's curators about it, we were advised that it was actually a mitre (the thing worn by a bishop on their head) signifying that this particular archbishop went on to become the Pope.
 

We drove into Bologna with our tRUSTY Peugeot GPS (really should do a separate post on our "brand new" car) guiding us to a car parking spot which we thought would be good for seeing the historic old centre.   Unfortunately this ended up being inside the Bologna ZTL (Zona Traffico Limitato) which if I'd have blindly followed the GPS directions and entered, we would have automatically been awarded a 100+ euro fine.  Anyway we fluked a 2.40Euro/hr park on a street just outside of the ZTL.

We wandered through the old centre of Bologna and what really stood out were the many arched porticos / arcades that lined nearly every street - ideal for keeping out of the searing hot sun.

Ferrara had another old town... and a novel (but not so effective) way of providing shade to nomads of the street ...