Andrew fell in love with Bologna right away. From them minute we stepped out of our apartment he was glowing. Having not slept for the three nights previous, I was a little slower to declare my admiration. Bologna is famous for several things: Rose colored buildings with porticos (this makes it an ideal city for the rain), the oldest University in Europe (80,000 students are a powerful force), radical politics (maybe related to those 80,000 students?) and really, really good food.We spent 3 days walking through the porticos, taking in the occasional museum and eating. We went to the Osteria D'Orsa, famous student digs of a restaurant, twice, once sitting with a Sardinian economist and his Romanian companion.

On the fourth day we took a cooking class with an opinionated, but extremely well informed teacher who said things like, “This deli is awful, just for tourists taking pictures, look at how poorly the cheese is cut.” She took us on a tour of the market introducing us to her brilliant but temperamental butcher (a genius, but he has these little “fits”), explaining what is wrong with produce today (everything is the same and a clone, solution, eat the varieties that still look weird), how to pick fish (stiff with rigor mortis) and feeding us an amazing variety of cured meat(the bresaola of foal was phenomenal).

Inside the only deli our teacher approved of. If you go to Bologna, drop me a note and I will send you the name, directions and a picture so you can find it. It is worth it.

After we bought the food for our meal we went to her apartment where we learned how to make homemade stuffed pasta and real proper ragu (did you know you are not supposed to see the vegetables?)

We also made meat rolls (with mortadella and a mortadella/spinach/parmigiano mixture) and a stuffed peach dessert. We left exhausted (true Italian pasta making, the kind that starts with mixing the egg with a knife and ends with endless rolling is hard work), and stuffed at 4:30. We had to nap and it wasn’t until about 9:30 that we were ready to think about eating again.

Andrew really loved his pasta