bologna

Oops, sorry... I thought we were talking about lunchmeat...

Yes, twice. It's a beautiful town with a well-preserved medieval center. It's famous for its food and there are many reasonable restaurants. It's also a major university town so it has a very youthful feeling. It's an easy stopover between Florence and Venice but the center is about a fifteen minute walk from the train station as I recall.

Bologna deserves more attention than it gets on this site.

It's one of my favorite Italian destinations too. The region is the food capital of Italy; Parma ham and Parmigiano Regiono cheese are from the region. Bologna has miles of covered sidewalks, one of the oldest universitys in Europe, and a lot of charm. Consider yourself blessed that you can go to a place where the guidebooks aren't sending hordes of tourists!

We stayed in Bologna only one night about 5 years ago as a planned stop over before flying out of Verona. Staying there was a very nice surprise. I knew next to nothing about as it's not normally on the list of biggies like Florence, Venice but we enjoyed our brief stay there.

The arcades are nice to walk thru, they have actually 2 old leaning towers (though not as nice as pisa's, but still interesting), some nice plazas to walk thru and a couple of interesting churches as well. Every meal we ate there, though it was only 3-4, was very good. Trattoria Papa Re was a nice small family run place we ate dinner at that only seated about 12-14 people and almost the owner's whole family was waiting on us.