Crooked Bologna

being another stop on a journey to Venice

Bologna is a university town, and it is often hard to separate the college from the community. The campus is the city, and its buildings weave unexpectedly in and out of the fabric. The old alma mater studiorum is also its own town, with the students electing and deposing their professors with the liberality of an Italian medieval commune.

It’s a fickle city, flickering back and forth between papal rule and local tyranny. It had once been the intractable enemy of Julius II, but when he emerged as the town’s champion against invading armies, he was greeted by raucous cheers. The result is a town (in)famous for leftist politics and rebellious behavior, dotto, grasso e rosso, learned, fat and communist-red. Italy invented the sullen left-wing college student, though sometimes he turns into Benito Mussolini instead.

One of Bologna’s more enduring landmarks is Italy’s other leaning tower, a stark, lean, flat-sided brick pinnacle listing uncomfortably at the intersection of four or five crowded streets. Next to it stands an even more slender watchtower, crowned with a tiny cupola outlined against the rainy grey sky.

It looms over the skyline in a dozen antique illustrations as starkly as an anachronistic Renaissance factory chimney, its warped sister always crookedly standing to one side. The combination of straight and crooked is the perfect symbol for Bologna, and you even see the two peculiar turrets in the ubiquitous miniature city San Petronio, the city’s patron, holds in every image.

Then there’s the fact that on one of the streets running alongside the spired side-aisle of the cathedral I caught a whiff of what I assumed to be burning tires. One of the professors informed me it was marijuana. Probably explains the crooked tower. Under these circumstances, I’m not really sure how the local architects prevent the city’s numerous and picturesque loggias and porticos from caving in. Almost every major street is lined with them, shielding its citizens from the rain in this cold, wet town. They somehow stay up.

At the same time, it is also a city adorned with churches and a long history of Papal rule. The looming medieval palazzo comunale is adorned with an elaborate frontispiece ensconcing a gargantuan bronze effigy of old Julius II, which, for the longest time had been disguised as San Petronio with an immense metal mitre and crozier.

The original statue had been cast in record time by Michelangelo during his grudging stay in the city, but was shortly melted down after the Pontiff’s enemies seized the city and recast into cannon. Only the triple-crowned head remained, now housed in a local museum. The current statue is a replica and very clearly Julius, though, in muddled Bolognese fashion, the inscription overhead still salutes him as Divus Petronius, protector et pater.

One of Bologna’s many churches is San Petronio, which might be the Duomo, or might not. Our professors and our guidebooks contradicted one another on the subject. It is a massive structure, its façade a curious collision of incompleted brick underlay and elegant Gothic marble facing. On the sides, the transepts stop idiosyncratically in mid-bay, perhaps frozen by some intrusion of the plague. People have been trying to refinish the front for centuries, from Vignola’s curious half-Gothic, half-classical design to some truly hideous Fascist-Romanesque proposals from 1933, one with the principal portal inscribed with a defiant civic Libertas. Inside, it is full of northern, refrigerated light, more the world of Bach than Palestrina with its whitewashed vaults, elaborate grillwork and Germanically baroque altar-pieces. San Petronio is in there somewhere, though we never quite found him.

By far, however, the most interesting of the city’s churches is the vast labyrinth of Santo Stefano, a strange Romanesque monastery complex that grew with weird organic order over a period of centuries. Churches lead into other churches, cloisters into other courtyards until you lose and find yourself again. In the first church, the old Santo Stefano, the votive candleholders are crusted with wax, while the high sanctuary is filled with dusty, smoky light washing the funereal black marble of a distant altarpiece.

Beyond it stands the Santo Sepolcro, a strange rotunda symbolically replicating the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem with its circle of columns and the murky dome far overhead. It seems abandoned, the massive cauldron-like lamps hanging from the arches unlit, a handful of guttering candles and silvery subterranean electric light piercing the shadows.

At the center stands the actual Sepulchre, irregularly-shaped, with a wooden cross, draped with a shroud, rising at its highest point. A little door, gridded like those old French images of the Child Jesus as the holy prisoner in the Tabernacle, was inset into the base, allowing penitents to prostrate themselves and look into that womb of the Resurrection, or a good copy at least. A marble inlay of a skull grins up from a tomb set into the floor. Calvary. Golgotha. The place of the skull.

Even the cortiles are almost empty of visitors. Moss grows between the riverstone paving, while bloated Romanesque faces hover overhead, and the stucco’d flank of the church pales from blood red to crumbling purple and bare brick. I sat alone in a little family chapel for a few minutes, dark and dim and unlit save for the merciless blank light of the cloudy sky. A faded fresco stood over the altar, while female angelic caryatids supported the altar-shelf as they discretely covered their breasts, a curiously earthy detail.

Alone. Does no one go to church in Bologna?

It may have been empty then, but as I walked out, Santo Stefano seemed filled with devotees, votive candles blazing. The Cathedral had been full for mass when we stopped in early that morning, while I had inadvertently walked in on an elaborate Vesperal service at another church that evening, pews filled. Not bad for a famously rosso town.

In addition to San Petronio (wherever he is), there are two other saints buried here. St. Catherine of Bologna’s incorrupt body, darkened by candle-smoke, sits enthroned in her old convent, while the more famous St. Dominic lies in a more conventional tomb to the south of San Petronio. I unfortunately missed St. Catherine due to bad research, but there was no way I was going to not check out San Domenico.

When we visited the church that morning and I loaded up on Dominican souvenirs in the gift-shop, I discovered they had Vespers that evening. Having gone to a Saturday vigil mass the night before in Modena—after which we had gone out to a Malaysian restaurant and eaten coconut chicken—I decided I would stop by that evening. Vespers with St. Dominic. Splendid.

With class and touring over, I lingered in the nave of the Cathedral. Mass was going on in the distant sanctuary, the baroque baldacchino a luminous sentry-box in the darkness. Banks of hundreds of votive candles blazed on either hand, throwing burnished light on the gilding and dark wood of the side-chapel reredos. As doors closed and opened, they flickered in the cold night air.

The white baroque plasterwork of San Domenico, however, was blindingly well-lit. I heard the invitatorium being sung in Italian at the other end of the church and hurried to one of the front pews. I listened as a young cantor in the black and white robes of the Dominican order sang, in strangely lackluster vernacular, the various psalms of the day. He stood to one side of the altar, while the celebrant was seated behind it on a raised sedilia. The rest of the brothers sat rather haphazardly, some in full preaching dress, others in plain white tunics, along the benches in the transepts. One of them looked about four feet tall.

It seemed strangely impoverished. Not fifty feet away I had glimpsed one of the finest oratories in Europe, lofty-vaulted and adorned with miraculous inlaid choirstalls, the immense missal-stand decorated with an image of St. Francis and St. Dominic embracing like the seeming opposites faith and reason, peace and justice. And now it was empty, the ancient chants abandoned for some paltry substitute. That, and it looked like the cantor’s white capuce was out of control. I later discovered he was wearing a faintly preposterous scarf underneath his hood.

But then something happened. They sang the Magnificat, and it seemed like a portal opened into another world. Solemn bows studded the chanting, and then, suddenly, two friars picked up the elaborate candelabra placed before the altar and led us in a grand procession to the middle of the church, moving towards the Lady Chapel that stood opposite the tomb of the Saint.

Suddenly, the black and white figures clustered around the altar, facing ad orientem towards the image of the Virgin above enshrined amid a whirl of gilded cherubim. The Tonus Monasticus setting of the Salve was sung, and then came more Latinate chanting from a lectionary. Another ancient responsory was begun and then we processed to the tomb, the Arca de San Domenico.

It had been grilled off by a high metalwork screen when we had visited that morning. But now it was open. We moved towards it, the friars circling the tomb, and more prayers were sung to implore the help of their holy patron. And then the ritual ended and we were left there to venerate the ark, a spired marble monument standing ensconced in an ambulatory-like apse. Some of us moved towards the back to make our reverences, and I realized there was a prie-dieu there I hadn’t noticed before. It was set before the niche enshrining the relic of his skull.

And so I bent down and knelt and saw a little glimpse of blackened bone beneath the glittering gold and glass. A stiff silver half-figure of the saint crowned the urn, bearing a tiny book—a real book with velvet cover and turnable parchment pages—in its hand. It was St. Dominic, the hound of God. It was his very cranium, this domed valve of sanctity that had caged the thoughts and prayers of his holy mind. I later discovered the young Michelangelo had done one of the sculptures that crown the tomb, one I had completely missed.

But nothing could compete with that fragment of holiness I had glimpsed, both the monks and their founder.