Bed and breakfast

Friday

Richard Koenig

Exploring Bologna from above

Matteo Giovanardi was navigating a midlife crisis amid a failed marriage and needing shelter when he moved into a medieval tower in the northern Italian city of Bologna. Rising over a small piazza, the tower topped out at 60 meters, its floors dirtied by pigeon droppings, its walls blackened with the soot of ages. Seven years passed before Giovanardi moved out. For he had found in this tower – the Torre Prendiparte – not only shelter but a salutary mission. “I needed to rinse away the pain, to imagine the rest of my life,” he tells me when I visit. “It is not only bricks. Prendiparte is a magical place.” It was early in the 1990s when Giovanardi took up residence in the tower.

bologna
Melissa Kite

Once we Brexiteers get our Irish passports, we can go anywhere

“There’s a flat rat under the mat!” I shrieked, and wondered whether that was the sort of jaunty phrase that could be used for elocution lessons. I had lifted this mat by the main staircase to hoover the floor beneath it and there it was, a perfectly flat rat in the shape of a cartoon dead beast beneath this mat. I began laughing uncontrollably, because if you’ve ever seen a flat rat under a mat you will know that it is intrinsically funny, whatever your views on rats. You will laugh even if you don’t like rodents, or indeed if you like them way too much. Even if you are a member of the Rat Preservation Society, when you see one flattened paper-thin, stuck to your floorboards, I challenge you not to burst out laughing, while jumping up and down.