Bologna!

After a loooooong night sleep on the train and a seven hour delay our train arrived at Bologna Centrale station at 1pm (our scheduled ETA was 6am).
A short taxi ride and we arrived at the apartment that will be home for the next 5 days. Even just walking into the building with the marble floors and grated elevator door it felt like we were in Italy. The apartment is spacious, clean, sunny and airy. Everything we could hope for. It’s also central and we’ve been able to walk everywhere.

We took one of the best shower of our lives and washed the 24 hour journey off and headed out to explore. We walked to the main part of town – by Plaza Maggiore and everywhere we looked was beautiful, from the buildings to people eating big Sunday lunches.

As we wandered around we even came across an antique market that is held every other Sunday. If only I hadn’t over packed my suitcase I would have bought tons!!
We looked for a market to buy food to cook dinner but since it was Sunday everything was closed. We were forced to eat out! We chose a restaurant called Diana. It was DELICIOUS! Randy kept saying Bologna was the culinary capital of Italy but as usual I doubted him, until this meal that is. To start i had a raddichio salad and Randy had tortellini in broth. While Randy made the better choice here I have to say, that salad was one of the best ones I’ve ever eaten.
Here are the last few tortellinis before they were eaten up! For my main I got Spaghetti Bolognese, after all this is the place it was invented! It was amazing and didn’t even have any tomato sauce in it. How do they do it? I’m going to replicate this dish if I have to suffer and make it every day until I get it right! Randy got a veal dish that was also amazing. To top it off we decided to celebrate our first day in Italy with some gelato, a perfect first day!