Navile

Two days ago, as we left Orsières with heavy hearts, we travelled past vineyard upon vineyard scattered across the low planes of the mountains. These vines are young, with the Swiss appellation system established only in the 1980s, and at the time only selling domestically. It’s only been in recent years that the Swiss have opened their wine market to international trade, putting delicious light flavoured varietal wines into the word - such as our new favourite red, Gamay.

We spent 5 hours in Sion before crossing the border on train into Italy. Sion is a small, very old (aren’t they all?) town featuring a few mini castle ruins atop surrounding mounts. We hiked up to the top of one of these, after our internal navigation seemingly felt inclined to head against gravity one last time.
We spent quite some time packing up a box of our unneeded stuff to send back home. This in itself was an ordeal as we needed to head to the local supermarket Migros and communicate our needs for a large box (which the post office couldn’t provide).

After a day of travelling, we arrived in our first Italian destination - Bologna! We jumped off what I’d call the wrong side of the tracks, only because the old town sits on the other side. We walked to what turned out to be perfectly comfortable hostel accomodation - a large shared room with separate beds, a desk area to play Monopoly Deal, and a mini fridge for our precious cargo of cheap Swiss chocolate.

We received a dinner recommendation which was perfect old world Bolognese style food, including the puffiest lightest little pillows of gnocchi with a ragu sauce that I’ve ever eaten. And Kate ate some delicious pan fried pasta, which in itself was a surprise after thinking it was just the veggies that would be fried. A bottle of local Sangiovese superiore and two hours of washing our filthy hiking clothes, we lay our weary heads down for the night.

For our one day in Bologna, we did what we do best - walk. We walked a total of about 20km around town, first by navigating the length of one of the world’s longest Porticos, leading up (yep, another hill) to Santuario della Madonna di San Luca. The portico consisting of 666 arches, was built in 1674-1793. We wandered the pastel orange, pink, brown and peach coloured buildings, connected by porticos of polished beauty. We have one stunning portico back home that I can think of - Melbourne’s GPO. Bologna has thousands that make up the very pretty city.

Once we had reached the main square of Bologna, we wandered around and discovered the collection of buildings that made up the old University. A cheap ticket each bought us access to view a beautiful old lecture hall, lined with books for a variety of subjects such as botany, geology, anatomy and zoology. The main attraction was the old anatomy theatre (Anatomical Theatre of the Archiginnasio) where they would have done dissections on corpses for groups of medical students to learn various body systems. It was pretty eerie as the marble bench lay in the centre in the ornate wooden room, surrounded by a small stadium of noisy creaking benches for viewing purposes. The walls and ceiling were incredible as wooden carvings of naked people were distributed in various positions, interspersed with old scripture.

For lunch we squeezed into some seats at a local cafe and ate a sample board of Bolognese cured meats from the region (think Parma ham). We also sampled some aged Parmesan reggiano drizzled with local Balsamic Vinegar from Modena. This was accompanied by local bread infused with ham, cheese and anchovies.

Later in the afternoon, Kate had booked us into accessing one of Bolognas last standing high rise buildings (Torre degli Asinelli) - a brick stack popping its head 97.2m above Bologna’s skyline. It was 498 steps up a worn wooden staircase, bolted somehow to the internal walls of the stack, and kept in place by very little additional reinforcing. Needless to say, it was invigorating but did not feel at all safe. Every hour, they let about 50 people in to walk up and down the one-way staircase, after taking in the surrounding vistas. Thousands must walk the stairs every year I kept telling myself, not sure if this was to console my sentiments of the dodginess of it all, or make me think how used the staircase was - just one crack, that’s all it would have taken!

After our heat busting climb up the stack we went for more gelato - this time I ordered a style named after the town, a coffee flavoured scoop with a pistachio chocolate paste swirled through it. Yum...it beat the plain pistachio and the cheesecake varieties I also tried.Read more