Delicious Bologna

We plan a trip into Bologna to coincide with returning a rental car and picking up another rental car at the airport. It’s a swap. It’s a pain. But you can only rent a car so long, for reasons I won’t go into.

After traffic and car complications, we got into the old city around 11:00, with a 1:00 lunch reservation at Teresina, a place that discovered us years ago. Usually we’re on the street at 10:00 and go directly to Enoteca Italiana for a sandwich and a glass of white wine. We did that today, at 11:00. Late for a morning sandwich. In this enoteca, the bread, Tizi says they call it a tartaruga (because it looks like a tortoise shell), the bread defies description. It’s the Platonic ideal of bread, a bread other breads wish they could be.

The sandwich is thin sheets of mortadella on the sliced tortoise shell. No sauce, no condiments, no lettuce or tomato. It’s heavenly bread and fragrant mortadella. That’s all. I asked one of the guys to recommend a white wine. Did I want one that was profumato? Or one that was aromatizato? Geez, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t know the difference. I said I’d go with aromatizato. What the hell.

We sat on stools and noshed, holding back the tears. The sandwich. The cold white wine. My mother would have wagged her finger: you’re spoiling your appetite, you won’t be able to eat lunch. My mother had never been to Bologna.

We wandered around our favorite blocks near the cathedral, I’d call it the glutton district, and got to Teresina a little after 1:00. We may tell ourselves we’ll skip the pasta. We might even believe it when we tell ourselves that. But when the server said, First? meaning first course, primo piatto? He said, First? and we’re in Bologna, so we said, Why yes, bring us what’s off menu today. It was tagliatelle with a veal ragu. We got one plate and sort of shared it. Other stuff came after that. Tizi heard the word carciofi (artichoke). We’d seen heaps of them out there in front of the fruit markets. I asked the server, Artichokes today? He said, Salad. I didn’t ask for it, but he brought it. And I ate the artichoke salad, thinking, Roughage. I’m taking on roughage. That’s good.

After lunch we walked a little slower, past other trattorie and restaurants, past people enjoying food, past locals going about their business, going home for lunch. We had done what we came to do.