MAMbo (… Not Italiano)

MAMbo here is not a reference to the Dean Martin song … “Mambo Italiano.” Yeah, you know the one I am talking about.

Rather, MAMbo here is for the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna … the museum where we spent a portion of our quiet Sunday afternoon.

After breakfast, we sat down to look at airfare to get us from the USA to Italy after we get our elective residence visa (ERV). Notice, by the way, that I said “after” and not “if.” I’m sending positive vibes out into the universe now that we are just a day away from signing the lease contract.

Anyway, we opted to buy tickets to return us to Bologna on 1 April 2026. It’s the first day United Airlines starts their seasonal non-stop route from Denver to Rome … and the date also works with the fact that it can take up to three months to receive the ERV (so says the Italian consulate website).

Thus, with another requirement for the ERV package now in the can — namely, having an airfare reservation — it was time to go out and have fun.

MAMbo is part of the Modern and Contemporary Art division of the Musei Civici Bologna. Housed in a former bakery, several of the rooms are dedicated to the Museo Morandi … a museum within a museum, if you will. Here one finds a collection of still life and flowers by Giorgio Morandi … the largest and most important collection of his paintings, watercolors, sketches, and etchings.

Frankly, very little of the work at MAMbo really appealed to us. I’m just glad that we visited today as admission was free. We can now check off this museum from our list of places to visit in the city.

The bonus of our outing to the museum was that our steps took us to a part of the city that we had not yet been to. We saw colorful buildings and another old gate into Centro Storico … Porta Lame. Fall was in the air … with colorful foliage in evidence on some of the trees … yellow, orange, red. Dried leaves on the street added interest to some of the photos I took along the way.

We returned to the AirBNB for dinner at home.Read more