On Monday evening we found the Piazza Maggiore largely occupied by booths being set up. Tuesday the Cioccoshow was open, with something like eighty vendors. Most of the chocolate looked very good. A number of the makers had put a lot of work into the appearance of the chocolates:
The old architecture is well-proportioned and handsome, and there are well-designed modern buildings to be seen here and there. However, not all modern adaptations of old buildings were thought through enough:
That is on the Piazza San Stefano. San Stefano is a very old church, or rather complex of churches. But the Benedictines who run it seem to be right up to date.
Finally, we have been astonished at the number of independent book stores: clearly, Bologna is not in the Amazon drainage. There are also news stands, which have nearly vanished from Washington, where one has Hudson News and not much else. This morning I stopped to by postcards at a newsstand, and saw
For 6.8 Euros, one can buy a bilingual edition of Epicurus's letters; that is inexpensive enough to be a casual purchase for the browser who had stopped by for a newspaper. Now, Hudson News does carry books, and might carry The Marriage of Opposites. I would not expect it to carry works of what I would consider philosophy, and certainly not a volume from the Loeb Classical Library.
I love Bologna. It was the first place I ever went to in Italy. At that time it was the richest city in Italy and the only one with a Communist council - which meant free public transport. Not that I really needed to go anywhere much, but I do remember catching a bus once and a very small child, just a toddler, dropped something and said to himself, "Scopami" and I couldn't decide if I was proud to have reached a level of Italian where I understood him or miserable that such a small child had such a foul mouth
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