Story: Bologna Frames Space and Time

Some years ago a friend of ours, Annalisa, gave us a book on Giorgio Morandi, an artist I had never heard of at the time but who has since become one of my favorites. His subjects are landscapes and still lifes, the latter usually household bottles arranged in varying architectural patterns. He plays with these hard objects through muted colors and in compositional arrangements against muted backgrounds, blending and softening edges and creating mysterious interfaces.

So when I first arrived in Bologna and took a tour of this powerful city of many firsts and mosts representing centuries and civilizations from as early as the Etruscans, I was quite delighted to discover that Morandi is a true Bolognese, an early 20th century native son. I truly enjoyed my visit to the museum devoted to his work located at the Palazzo d’Accursio, just off the Piazza Maggiore.

The museum is accessed by either an elevator or a long and wide, low angle ramp leading to the second floor and bars as steps regularly embedded across it. This ramp was built in the 16th century so that horses could fetch the palace officials indoors from their working and living quarters.

One need not actually go to the Morandi Museum to see the tones and shapes on his canvases. He was influenced by the muted red, orange and yellow tones and arches and curves of the portici. There are 41 kilometers of these covered sidewalks, like arcades, built to add living space above them and just high enough to accommodate a horse and rider so that they could navigate the city under cover.

There are portici on three sides of the Piazza Maggiore, the fourth side being the site of Basilica San Petronio, considered the fifth greatest church in the world and dating back to 1390. It contains the world’s largest sundial built in 1655 and designed by the famous astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini. He would perch himself on a high window ledge and follow the movement of sunlight as it crossed the 66.8 meters long sundial line. Sunlight still beams through this same window in this great church in 2008.

Bologna nearly 75 years earlier in 1582 had another connection to the measurement of time and the sun. The papacy of Pope Gregory XIII was based in Bologna and he added a leap year to the Julian calendar so that it would be more closely aligned with the tropical year. The Gregorian calendar is to this day the accepted calendar for secular purposes but only France, Spain, Portugal, and the Italian states adopted it at the time. England and the American colonies did not use it until 1752. In 1918 Russia devised its own calendar by adding more accurate revisions.

The Piazza Maggiore itself is noisy with the sound of families - chatter, play, tears, laughter – which knows no century boundaries. They are dressed in classy style, dressed to kill. Ultramodern Italian fashion is modeled on an antique stage. Did all the contemporaries of their respective centuries dress in such high fashion?

Quite close to the Piazza Maggiore is the mercato with its display of earthen riches and nutrition pure and simple. The colors alone - tomato, avocado, aubergine, lemon, olive -entice the passersby who absorb the health emanating from this nutritious display. The earth’s palette makes the human palate alive. The earth’s power to yield food allows humans the power to grow and repair.

History can be reconstructed but its remnants persist in some way in its people, its artists and artisans, its customs, its food. Like Morandi whose paintings frame objects as a blend of distinct shapes, colors, size, and stature, Bologna frames space and time with this distinct blend with everyday living superimposed.

I checked my e-mail at the internet café under the portico which leads to the oldest degree granting university in the world built in 1088. Some students who had just received their Baccalaureate were also under the portico. They were each wearing the crown of laurels. The contemporary mysteriously interfaces with and perhaps trespasses on history but does not interfere.

Thank you Annalisa.