Bellissima Bologna

Hi there! Zev and I are in incredible Italy this week for our last holiday before heading back to the States. Our first stop was Bellissima Bologna:

We drove down here from Germany and were blessed with great weather and great driving conditions. We drove through the Dolomite Mountain Ranges and even saw some Italian castles along the route.

It was Zev's idea to come down to the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, which is known as the "foodie Capital" of Italy, after reading an article in the latest "Bon Appetit" magazine. You can read the article here: http://www.bonappetit.com/magazine/2011/05/how-to-eat-emilia

Above we are standing with Anna Maria from Trattoria Anna Maria, who was featured in the magazine (as well as on the link above) and who hand makes all her pastas.

Lunch at her trattoria was everything we expected. The pasta was cooked to perfection. I ordered the renowned Tagliatelle Al Ragu and Zev ordered the Tortellini with Butter and Sage.

The sauce on the tagliatelli was fabulous; as described in the article, the sauce clinged to each pasta strand and boasted some intense, amazing flavors.

Bologna is such an easy to get around town! What we loved about this beautiful, historic city is that it is NOT "touristy" like Florence or Venice.

I must say here that Venice is still my favorite place on earth, but Bologna seems so REAL.

Real food, real Italian people going about their business.

I think we saw like one shop that sold Bologna magnets and postcards.

Other than that, Bologna is a historic, beautiful, sort of grungy university town with GREAT food. A must do is to walk up the tallest tower, which gives a gorgeous view of the city. My uni professor actually recommended walking up these towers. The only recommendation I would have is to think twice about walking up in summer platform shoes. Although they DID look cute as I am sure you can also appreciate. And one must look cute in Italy...

In honor of our Bon Appetit- inspired "foodie" holiday, we tried to recreate the picture on page 130 of the May 2011 edition:

Zev loves to visit the gourmet food markets (which of course we call gourmet but to the Europeans, these are like their regular grocery markets. I love it.) Zev was in a foodie photographers paradise, taking pictures of everything while sugar plums danced in his head. Well perhaps parma hams danced in his head. You know what I mean. He loves this stuff....

Yesterday we spent the day in Modena, Italy, another city in the Emilia- Romagno region. I will post about that trip in the next blog entry. It is midday in Parma (land of Parmigiano.Reggiano cheese, Prosciutto ham and salami, with museums to each of these delicious speciality foods!) La Vita really is Dolce here!