Wedding alternatives

The plan to escape royal wedding fever didn't really work. When the guardian outside the 5th century tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna takes your tickets and says 'ah, eengleesh, William and Kate', you might as well give up. World television coverage ensured an inescapable level of multi-lingual voyeuristic participation in nuptials that managed somehow still to appear as much a happy family event as a public spectacle. Everyone was having a good time with no more malice abroad than the odd giggle over an ill-judged hat.


Consecutive long weekends, whatever their excuse,plus the end of the school holidays, were bound to be enough reason for a trip somewhere. At the moment, with wall to wall summer here, finding the sun is less of a concern than usual but Emilia Romagna provided continuing warmth as well as a cultural feast. For a long term anti-establishment, communist led region, its people showed an unexpected level of surprise that we had dragged ourselves away from a closer view of our monarchy en fete.


Instead we stared, through our binoculars when necessary, at the mosaic portraits of long dead Byzantine rulers glowing high on the walls of fifteen hundred year old churches; their courts both temporal and spiritual spilling out of arched and gilded rooms into allegory filled flower gardens. At the apex of the dome in the Arian Baptistery, a naked Christ stands waist deep in the river Jordan for his baptism by John the Baptist, while, on the walls of Sant Apollinare roguish magi are frozen forever leading 22 holy virgins to present gifts to the baby. Lilies bloom, partridges and peacocks perch or fly and, on the arch above the apse where Sant Apollinare stands in a green meadow, the lambs of God march purposefully from a pavilion towards Jerusalem.

The mosaics in Ravenna are wonders of the World. The breathtaking decoration in the high arches of San Vitale no less stunning for our familiarity with the portraits of an irritable looking Emperor Justinian and his Empress, Theodora, whose stern imperial pride belies her somewhat less glorified background. Meanwhile, back in the intimate room with its starry ceiling and alabaster windows that Galla Placidia built to hold her tomb, a cross wielding San Lorenzo's white robes billow about him as he pauses in his stride towards the roaring flames heating his gridiron and offers us a look of furious conviction. On the opposite arch, the good shepherd watches from a nice cool pasture, deer graze peacefully and doves drink from marble cups.

To get to Ravennna, we flew to Bologna and spent a day or so in that terracotta city wandering the arched passageways, merchant palazzi, markets and churches. We stayed in the perfectly central B&B Conchiglia, whose location is its only real selling point. The proprietress appeared in pink stretch pyjamas at all times of day and breakfast barely featured but there are cafe's round every corner and the bathrooms were clean. In contrast, our highly reasonable B&B, bang in the centre of Ravenna, the Villa Maria de Foris was well up to the standards of a luxury hotel. Excellent rooms with spotless bathrooms full of soaps and shampoos and new towels daily; a garden courtyard; internet and Sky for the wedding highlights; fantastic breakfasts with the freshest possible pastries, yoghurt, ham, cheese and so on and capuccino on demand.


Ravenna itself is improved these days by the pedestrianisation that has taken over the centres of so many Italian towns and cities, much to their advantage. Its surrounding industries must just be endured during drives north up the coast to the villages and marshes of the Po Delta or South to the fleshpots of the Italian Riviera and Rimini and the stamp collecting delights of San Marino.


We hired a car to travel to the mediaeval squares and walls of Ferrara, where the fortress of the D'Este dukes dominates the city; to the charming 'little Venice' canals of Comacchio, hidden amidst more ugly industrianalia; to the canals and waterways where a lock system engineered by Leonardo da Vinci is marked by the most romantic pumping station ever built, the 16th century Torre dell'Abate, near Mesola; South to Rimini to see the bizarrely remarkable unfinished Tempio Malatestiano with its exquisite Piero della Francesco of Sigismund Malatesta; and to the remains of the magnificent Abbey of Pomposa with its towering campanile right beside the main SS309.


Inside the patterned brick walls of abbey church and refectory the Giottesque beauty of frescoes by Vitale da Bologna and unknown artists of the same school are a little known deight and very much worth a trip enriched further by a spectacular marble pavement added, in the 12th century, to much earlier remains. An improbable bazaar like courtyard of tourist tat stalls selling food, football shirts and plenty of indian made souvenirs is kept by the car park, mercifully hidden from the Abbey itself and presumably attracts passing busloads who may or may not have an interest in walking as far as the church.


The small roads right to the coast are signposted to the endless small lidi where holiday makers roast themselves during summer feriale in varying degrees of comfort. In the coastal fishing village of Gordino some of the fleet of small boats in the marina may occasionally be pressed into tourist service but they are rough, tough, workmanlike vessels in an area where people once toiled in the valuable salt trade that upheld local fortunes and was fought over endlessly by its rulers. Along the river banks great fishing nets hang on square frames, used in Autumn to catch the eels that are an important local delicacy on their migration from the rivers to their mystical spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea. Truth be told, these days, the eels are scarcer and most used in tradtional local eel dishes have been farmed like the asparagus, another area speciality, and one we managed to miss by a day eating from the mobile kitchens of the annual asparagus festival in Mesola.


We ended up in Mantua, making a dash for the Mantegna frescoes in the camera degli sposi of the Ducal Palace, through the unlovely factories and power stations of the featureless Lombard plain, before our return to Bologna and home. The city's surroundings have changed so much in the many years since I last visited that it is hard to believe the mirage like first sight of the walls, towers and domes of Mantua floating above its encircling lakes. Happily, the town itself, like the Ravenna mosaics remains as remembered, only, in this case, noisier for the crowds of school children being forcibly educated in the glories of their artistic past.

One can still drive straight over the lake causeway into the cobbled square by the ducal palace and park a car with ease. We ate lunch in the sun in the square by the round church of San Lorenzo, avoiding local donkey stew whatever the temptation to get even with our bad-tempered family donkey, Esmerelda, in favour of melting tortelli stuffed with pumpkin on plates rimmed with macaroon crumbs and glasses of fizzy local white wine. The rowdiest children dispersed to other sites, we walked the long passages of the palace past exemplars of the worst of 17th century painting to glory in Mantegna's portraits of Ludovico Gonzaga, his family, courtiers, dogs and horses.

The Hotel del Borgo near the airport in Bologna where we spent our final night has little to recommend it other than the free airport shuttle and the very short time we spent there prior to catching an uncomfortably early flight to London.