Ciao a tutt*! This week has been the perfect mix of sunny with a nice breeze, flowers are starting to bloom, and the markets are selling more fruit– we can see that spring is coming!! Yesterday while I was going for a run, I saw two beautiful trees covered in blossoms; it felt like the setting of a fairy tale. The blooming of flowers in spring is my favourite time of the year, and seeing how Bologna changes from winter to now is amazing.
I have commented on this in other blog posts, but there are not a lot of green spaces in Bologna. There are two main parks, one of which is on the outskirts of the city. The city itself is depressingly void of greenery, not even some flower boxes. A main reason for this is the way buildings are structured, in which there is a cloister of buildings with a middle courtyard, and that courtyard does have greenery, but it is not visible to the public. This makes me a bit sad, however I love sitting in my sit spot and seeing all the dogs running around and the birds flying, and the main park, Giardini Margherita, is beautiful, with a river running through it, and on the weekends it is difficult to find an empty patch of grass because half the city is there. Despite the lack of greenery, Bologna is very conscious about the environment and recycling is incredibly important. There are five main separations of refuse, and the bolognese are proud of maintaining this separation. They are also very anti-littering– one time my napkin flew away and I did not realize, and a man came up to me and started yelling about how I was making the city uglier (which at the time was very scary but has made me much more aware of my actions). I would like to bring back this awareness of trash to America, and improve my own recycling habits and compost more. That said, there is a level of privilege in being environmentally conscious, and while Bologna does not have a huge homeless population, I wonder sometimes if the effort going into recycling could be transferred over to helping people find homes and work. These issues are not mutually exclusive and very complex, so I do not have any easy answers, but it is something I am thinking about. Bologna is such an interesting place to be doing the Paulson Initiative, because it is a student city and therefore has so many environmentally conscious people and many protests, but it is also a city, with buses and cars and few green spaces. This city is a very complex organism, and I love studying here!
This dog that I met in Giardini Margherita is my best friend.
