When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in Bologna, ask for ragù, but absolutely do not ask for it with spaghetti. Despite a certain dish being Italy’s best-known export since the Roman Empire, Sophia Loren, a few years ago the then-Mayor of Bologna, Virginio Merola, launched a culinary-awareness campaign in which he described spaghetti bolognese as “fake news”. He had a point – a wider, thicker pasta holds the rich, meaty sauce far better.
I was reminded of this as I sat down to lunch in a packed trattoria with one of my favourite travelling companions. Only an hour earlier we had ascended and descended the iconic Asinelli Tower, right at the heart of the city, and (alas) now closed indefinitely while emergency stabilisation works are underway. We were in celebratory mood: he had done all 800 steps effortlessly on a new bionic leg, and I hadn’t needed the defibrillator at the top.
We were lucky to find a spot in the corner; it was a Saturday and there was an enormous party underway, gathered around two long tables seating 20 people each – the men all on one and their wives and children on another. After the pasta arrived, one of the women got up and crossed the floor to check that her husband’s was done to his liking. He put his arm around her as she leaned over him, and pulled her in for a kiss. The whole table cheered.
It was a far cry from what Charles Dickens called, in Pictures from Italy, “an ancient sombre town”. On his travels in 1845, Dickens hardly noticed Bologna as he travelled from Modena to Ferrara – he appears to have spent a disproportionate amount of time in their cemeteries – but he stopped long enough to note the “heavy arches over the footways of the older streets, and lighter and more cheerful archways in the newer portions…”
With his apathy towards Catholicism (and, to be fair, towards any expression of Christianity beyond the most nondescript kind) Dickens saw Bologna as much like all the other towns he had visited: “Again, rich churches, drowsy Masses, curling incense, tinkling bells, priests in bright vestments: pictures, tapers, laced altar cloths, crosses, images, and artificial flowers.” He also identified “a grave and learned air about the city, and a pleasant gloom”.
The learned bit may have come from the university, I suppose, for Bologna’s is even older than Oxford. It was a graduation day, and as we sat sipping birre on the Via Rizzoli later on, newly-minted doctors milled around with their families and friends, with enormous bouquets of flowers in their arms and laurel wreaths on their heads. I find nothing grave or gloomy about Bologna, although there is certainly much that is pleasant. It is, of course, full of churches.
Dickens nodded at their existence, but I wonder how many of them he actually visited during his brief sojourn. Certainly he went to San Petronio, the magnificent unfinished basilica on the main piazza, for he remarked on the great meridian line that runs diagonally across the nave, “where the sunbeams mark the time among the kneeling people”. Confusingly, it isn’t the cathedral, which is just around the corner and not nearly as impressive.
Did he go to see the tomb of St Dominic at San Domenico, however, or up the seemingly-interminable slope to the Santuario di Madonna di San Luca? Did he sit for a moment in the vastness of San Paulo Maggiore, or wonder at the seven-churches complex of Santo Stefano, with its recreations of the sacred sites of Jerusalem ready for the annual liturgical observance of the Paschal Triduum according to Bologna’s historic and distinctive Rite?
Dickens made such a fleeting visit that it seems unlikely. He therefore missed one of the most remarkable things that I have seen in any church, anywhere – and, as you may imagine, that’s up against some pretty stiff competition. In a side chapel of Santa Maria della Vita on the Via Clavature – the church of a confraternity who ran the hospital of the same name next door – sits Niccolò dell’Arca’s Compianto sul Christo morto.
Leading the ranks of the preeminent terracotta compositions of the Renaissance, the Compianto presents Our Lady, the other Marys, John the Evangelist and Joseph of Arimathea (all life-size) gathered around the body of the dead Christ, freshly laid in the tomb. The men are more pensive – John is still trying to process the scene, while Joseph gazes out, inviting the viewer in – but the women tell the full horror of the story in searing, burning distress.
I cannot tell you how dell’Arca managed to mould clay into such piercing, screaming, vibrant form. John Berger, in The Red Tenda of Bologna, called it “a hurricane of grief”. The pain is palpable; their eyes are forever locked in tearful contemplation of the Crucified One. In that moment it must have seemed, despite the prophecies and promises, that a different story that began with the shaping of clay into human form had run its course in vain.
Photo: ‘Compianto sul Christo morto’ by Niccolò dell’Arca. (Cropped image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
This article first appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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