IMAGINATION OVER TIME

WITH TASTES OF BOLOGNA and RAVENNA

Long ago, in my twenties, I fell in love with Byzantine mosaics. I was in Rome for a couple of weeks, staying with my aunt and uncle. Mosaics became a thread for me to follow as I explored the city. I relied on a guidebook to help me find them.

A few years later my friend Trisha, who was travelling for a couple of weeks in Italy with her husband and small child, sent me a postcard from Ravenna, a dazzling image of mosaics. Ahh, I thought, I must get to Ravenna. But somehow decades passed without that happening. And then last week, finally, while visiting Bologna for the first time, I took the train to Ravenna, a short 75 minute ride. The mosaics were as marvelous as I had imagined, the number of visitors small, the town easy to navigate.

I walked from the train station to Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, where I spent ages looking up at the mosaics that line the length of the church. But then when I walked out into the garden I found myself in tears. I had to sit down as my feelings welled up. Somehow the thought of the many years that had passed since I first learned of Ravenna was overwhelming. I’m lucky to have lived all these years. But the vista of all the people dear to me who are no longer alive to laugh at how long it took me to get to Ravenna, created a deep sense of loss. Then gradually it passed and after the tears came a calm lightness, as I returned to the present.

When I look at a building, a painting, a mosaic, that was created centuries ago, I’m trying to understand and appreciate it. If I take the time to really engage, I start to visualise the hands that made it, the humans who conceived of it and lived and breathed their way to finishing it. When I add this active awareness of the living beings that created it, I’m not mourning their deaths centuries ago. Instead I’m celebrating their achievement and feeling grateful that it has survived.

sunrise in Bologna train station

Gratitude is the state of mind to strive for when I’m overwhelmed by grief and a sense of loss. As a friend of Dom’s said to him, speaking of grief at the loss of our dearest people, ‘We’re lucky to have loved and been loved. The consequence of this love is that we suffer when our loved ones die. But we wouldn’t want things to be otherwise. We wouldn’t want never to have loved.’

Back in Bologna I was delighted with its humanness. Cars are almost completely absent. There are tall colonnades everywhere to shelter pedestrians from sun and rain. There’s an intimacy to being protected as you walk through the city. And it’s beautiful. The physical environment was warming and reassuring in its age and beauty, the university quarter a reminder that this, the oldest university in Europe, is still going strong.

When I wrote to a friend who is in failing health about the loveliness of Bologna, he told me he’d never been and that he would try to push himself to go. I wrote back to ask him to treat himself with kindness, rather than forcing things. There are limits to what we can physically do, where we can go, and many places and people in the world that we’ll never get to. I might never have reached Ravenna, for example. And I doubt that I’ll get to Patagonia or Vladivostok. But I can travel in time and space in my mind’s eye, to other places past and present, helped by details from books and maps and travellers’ stories.

The long beautiful train journey from Bologna to Berlin, with a change of trains in Munich, was a chance for me to think about these things. A train journey is time spent in the places in between, time to be reminded of other journeys, other people, time to daydream. Being present to where we are doesn’t prevent us from travelling in the landscape of our imagination from time to time.

The train passed along the wall of the Dolomites, which I’d read about but never seen. The white and grey rock faces we passed by on our way to the Brenner Pass and the Austrian border were dramatic. I don’t know exactly when the skies changed from the intense blue of Italy to a paler luminous northern European vastness. And then as the day ended there I was in the Berlin train station being greeted by my friend Ursula.

FOOD THIS AND THAT, IN BOLOGNA AND RAVENNA

I met two young women from Tbilisi on my first evening in Bologna; I was fresh off my flight from Tbilisi to Rome and the train ride north. We exclaimed at the unexpectedness, and ended up eating supper together. Bologna is famed for its food, rich and delicipus. But the women, N and M, were very homesick for Georgian food. I ordered an octopus salad for them to taste, and tortellini in brodo, a Bologna classic. They went for pizza. Then we shared and tasted each other’s food. The pizza was terrific, by far the best order. Surely it comes close to khachapuri in some ways? I asked them. They acknowledged that it was OK, but they remained homesick for the distinctive wonderful flavour combinations of home. And I confess that in the following days I too felt occasional pangs of longing for the Georgian table.

the delectable pizza in Bologna, ordered by the Georgian women; a Georgian cheese and herb-filled bread called Mkhlovana, eaten at Giorgobistve in Tbilisi the day before I left

Still, there were delights: fried zucchini flowers, a delicious pumpkin risotto, tortellini in brodo, and more. And then the gelateria I stumbled on, called Sable. There I found inventive flavours, and beutiful attention to quality dairy too. The flavours change, but when I was there he was making a hop-flavoured ice cream that was spectacular. I had it with a crema Bolonese and then another day with a candied cherry ice cream. The hops gave a little clutch of bitter, a tickle in the throat, rather like that from a Tuscan olive oil, it seemed to me.

fried zucchini flowers at Diana, a Bologna resto; risotto with pumpkin and sausage at Ca Ven in Ravenna

AND A BOOK RECOMMENDATION

In Tbilisi I bought a book about the great cartographer-geographer Mercator, who lived in the Low Countries in the 1500’s. Highly recommended. It was fascinating to see the turbulent events on that era through the life story of a guy whose work we know. The bloodshed in what is present-day Belgium and the Netherlands was crazy, as the Catholic church fought to keep its primacy while Martin Luther preached reform. In my high school history we learned about the sixteenth century primarily through the monarchs and events in England, where things were also bloody, but I failed to get any sense of the larger international pushes and pulls on the continent, and the resulting ravages of war.