Adventures in Europe: Bologna, Italy

We managed to sleep in until well after 7:00 yesterday morning, which meant we had nearly 12 hours of sleep, so we were pretty happy with that.

After a great breakfast in the dining room of our bed and breakfast, we headed out to enjoy our full day in Bologna.

Bolgona's historical centre has 38 kilometres of porticoes--and apparently porticoes have been a iconic feature of Bologna for more than a 1,000 years!  The porticoes are so noteworthy that they are on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List.

Besides the architecture, we spent a lot of today enjoying the food and coffee Bologna had to offer.

We even ate at a place where you could order tortellini on a nice little self-ordering machine!

The real highlight was a bottle of local white wine at the Piazza Maggiore.

We broke up our drinking/eating with some walking, and we climbed the taller of the two towers for some great (albeit-somewhat-cloud-obstructed) views of the city.

Climbing towers is certainly my kind of tourist thing to do.  Hop-on, hop-off tour buses, less so; but, Diana persuaded me to give it a try.  It proved to be an okay way to see the city, but overpriced and not particularly exciting.  However, I turned it into a real highlight by bringing along a three euro bottle of red wine and drinking it in the back seat of the bus.  The highlights of Bologna proved all the more interesting when toured like this...

\