The History of Bologna

After my less than exciting experience at MAMbo I wanted to visit another museum and was totally free of any commitments on Friday the 25^th. As a side note, I had spent much of the morning trying to correct some problems with my blog so I didn’t leave the house until almost 1:00 in the afternoon. As I reached the bottom of the hill to take the bus I noted that both the bar and the tabaccheria on Saragozza were both closed. They are always open except on Sunday so I immediately knew that it must be a holiday. April 25^th is the Festa della Liberazione (Liberation Day) which is a national holiday commemorating the liberation of Italy from Nazi occupation in 1945. In any case that doesn’t mean much to me except that the buses will be running on a holiday schedule which means no buses to the center of town. So I must walk further. The museum is in Palazzo Pepoli in the historic center and was constructed by a member of the important family Pepoli in 1344 and remained in the family until 1910.

Now it has been converted into the Museum of the History of Bologna. It’s really a well done museum. You follow the history of Bologna from the Etruscan period – roughly 500 BC to the current day. Interesting and very well done exhibits. All of the written displays are in Italian but there are sheets of paper in each room with translations into French, German and Spanish.

 

As you can see there are many interesting exhibits. Half of the exhibit is on the ground floor and half on the third floor; in Italy it’s the second floor – the first floor is called the ground floor then up one flight is the first, etc. So I took the elevator up and before returning back down I decided to take a respite sitting on one of the nice black leather couches near the elevator.

While there I took a couple of pictures of the interesting architecture inside the museum and in the process must have put my camera, which is also black, down on the couch and, well, forgot and left it there. I didn’t notice until the evening when I reached into my bag and realized that it wasn’t there. I want back the next afternoon and to my great relief someone had found it and turned it in. I’m always delighted when honest citizens allow me to recover gracefully from a mistake that I make.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2014 at 1:50 am and is filed under Culture, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.