Day 35 - Modena

# Gelati: 1, Distance Walked: 13.0km

Today is a Saturday so there is no class.  Instead, I went to Modena for the day.  It is only about a 30 minute train ride away.

The first thing I did on arriving was to climb the Ghirlandina tower.  I always have to find a high viewpoint in every city I visit.  In this tower, all the wooden floors have rotted away/been removed so the you can basically see all the way from the bottom to the top.  They've closed all the window shutters but have strung up lights.  I would love to have been able to visit it when it was a functioning tower.

After the tower I visited the duomo next door.  Whoever carved the lions at the entrance (and the ones inside) had clearly never seen one in real life.  I have to wonder if they had ever seen a domestic cat.

After all this culture I just wandered around the city centre for a bit.  Unsurprisingly car racing and sports cars are big business here.  There is some sort of car-related festival going on all month.  In one square several local universities were showing off the racing cars their students have made and advertising their specialised engineering programs.  It made me want to sign up to do another degree.

I then went to the local market.  It is very new.  Not quite 100 years old yet.  Younger even than our Queen Vic market.  It was a good market.  Fruit, veg, butchers and fishmongers, along with bread and pastry stalls.  There were several stalls selling balsamic vinegar of course.  I took advantage of one offering free samples to try some.  A properly aged vinegar tastes amazing.  I felt a little guilty about doing this as there was no way I was going to buy any.  I suspect I could bring it back into Australia but I would worry about the bottle getting broken.

The market also had a restaurant section.  It was more upmarket than a food hall as you got table service.  I had a pizza with DOC prosciutto and DOC mozzarella on it.  It was Good.  I think it is the first pizza I've had in Italy.

I did some more wandering around the historic centre after this and had a Good gelati for dessert (hazelnut as they didn't have pistachio and sour cherry with chocolate chips).

I then headed to the Enzo Ferrari museum which is where the house he lived in as a boy used to be.  They had several Ferraris parked out front with a very hot and very bored and very armed guard keeping an eye on them.  He also had a dog (Belgian Malinois?) but it was sensibly staying in the shade.

One of the Ferraris was purple.  I'm torn between loving the colour and being shocked that they make them in any colour other than red.

I then headed into the museum only to discover a ticket cost 32 euro!  I wasn't that interested so I just browsed in the shop for a bit instead.  Here I bought myself a t-shirt for the outrageous price of 115 euro.  For some reason I considered this to be better value for money than a ticket to the museum.

I then decided to head back to Bologna before I bought any more souvenirs.  I got to the railway station 6 minutes before a train was due to leave.  I used the Trenitalia app to buy a ticket but in my haste I got the wrong ticket.  I only bought one to take me to one station up the line, not all the way to Bologna.  I tried buying another ticket but the app wouldn't let me.  I tried buying a ticket from the station up the line to Bologna but still no joy.  Too close to the time of departure I suspect.  I got on the train anyway and just hoped I didn't encounter a ticket inspector.  I hadn't seen one on the journey that morning.

I was lucky.  The train is a double-decker train and I was close to one end of my car.  I could see into the car ahead of me.  I saw an inspector walk through the upper deck of the car ahead and then go down into the lower deck.  While he was down there I hastily nipped into the upper deck he'd just cleared.  I got away with!

Back in Bologna, I just got some bread, cheese and salami from the supermarket for dinner.  I'm still rather full from lunch and my jeans are getting uncomfortably tight.