Emilia Romagna: Where Abundance Trumps Wealth

The statue of Neptune that strides so powerfully out of the sea from Giambologna’s 1567 Fountain of Neptune, centers Bologna, much as Bologna centers Italy’s Emilia Romagna region. Though originally founded by Etruscans, with an entirely medieval architecture, Bologna feels the most youthful of the region’s cities, thanks to the abundance of students moving through its narrow streets and under its signature colonnades.

Groups of students can usually be found sitting around the base of the fountain where water flows from the sea nymphs, cherubs and mermaids. Students make up about one in four of the city’s population. Bologna is the gateway and capital to the Emilia Romagna, a region that like the fountain expresses its vital spirituality in the most sensual terms.

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While the region is home to great musical names like Verdi, Toscanini and Pavarotti as well as beautiful visual arts including what may be the finest of all mosaic masterpieces, found in Ravenna’s San Vitale, most visitors come here for the love of food. Dining is only part of it. The preparation, creation and perhaps most of all the cyclical rites of its traditional cultivation are the biggest reasons people come here.

Italy gave us the Slow Food movement, a movement that appreciates food as an expression of the specific soil, climate, craft and culture that produced it. Slow Fooders value food much in the same way that connoisseurs appreciate wine. The traveler who shops for organic produce at the local farmers market, Whole Foods or Trader Joes, will come here to experience the vineyards, the farms, the makers of Parmijiano, Prosciutto, Mortadella, Balsamic Vinegar and fresh hand-made pastas.

I recently traveled the Emilia Romagna on a “Farm to Table” journey with several American tour operators. Carol Sicbaldi of Whole Journeys (a travel division of Whole Foods) described her journeys in the region as a chance to “meet with producers of food, explore the traditions and the culture behind the food.”

Our group visited wine cellars stacked with barrels; streets whose store windows bulged with mounds of ravioli and pyramids of crumbled Parmigiano hanging beneath hams; and homes where Balsamic Vinegar ages in barrels. At most meals, the region’s sparkling red Lambruscos were served.

Bologna and Ravenna are the region’s two most important heritage cities. In 1088, Bologna opened Europe’s first university. That university created a much needed conduit connecting the best of antiquity to medieval Italy and in the process helped lay the groundwork for the Renaissance.

At a time when local church prelates and noblemen were imposing punishments arbitrarily, the legal scholars of the University of Bologna revived Roman Law using the 6^th century Code of Emperor Justinian as the guide to the establishment of legal precedent and tradition.

Thomas Becket, who was martyred for his defense of legal precedent by Henry II, brought legal scholars from Bologna back to England with him and those scholars laid the Roman foundations of English Law. Geoffrey Chaucer also visited Bologna to call on the great Francesco Petrarch who is said to have introduced the English poet to the Italian verse forms that he brought back to England, including the sonnet. Dante and Boccaccio are also alumni— the former is believed to have written the Inferno in the city. He’s buried in Ravenna.

A great tradition in visual art is expressed in the sparkling fragments of colored glass used to make the mosaics in such churches as the Basilica of San Vitale and the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare. The powerful influence of the mosaics in San Vitale can be felt echoing down the centuries all the way to the portraits of Gustav Klimt.

Lastly, the tradition of agricultural and culinary craftsmanship in the region has a mechanical expression in the production of some of the world’s finest automobiles. The Museo Enzo Ferrari in Modena rises like a yellow swell out of the ground located in front of the house where he was born.

Both the house and the futuristic museum display the engines and the automobiles by Ferrari and Maserati that set new standards in both performance and design. There are times in this museum when you feel that these automobiles, in all of their finely crafted beauty, would be more at home on a Milanese catwalk. A superb multi-media projection tells the full story of Ferrari’s life and work.

Just about everywhere in Italy, the layers of history run rich and deep, and so they do here in a region where Hannibal and his elephants came down from the Alps to defeat a Roman army during the Punic War and where Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but ancient lives take a backseat to Life in the Emilia Romagna. Tucked away between the hills of the Northern Apennines, there’s a secret that this region’s craftsmen, farmers, vintners and food producers are eager to share.

That secret lies in the difference between production and cultivation and the difference between wealth and abundance. Labor done with devotion within the cycles of nature is the fundamental ethic you’ll find from one end of this region to the other. When one’s labor, one’s craft is a measure of one’s ethics, mere work takes on spiritual properties. Wealth can be measured in money, but the Emilia Romagna is not about wealth, it’s about abundance. You subtract from wealth and wealth diminishes, but from abundance you can never subtract, you can only harvest and after you harvest abundance remains just as abundant.