Tuesday, 24 September 2024, Verona to Bologna, via cheese, fast cars, and vinegar; Grand Hotel Majestic già Baglioni

Written 1 February 2025

palazzo recycle A busy day on Tuesday, with three stops for tours along the way to Bologna. We had to get an early start to fit it all in, so luggage outside our rooms by 6:45 am, shuttle from the hotel back to our bus in the fleet of minivans, and into the bus by 7:45 am.

At checkout, we discovered that somebody put $14 worth of bottled water on our bar bill last night, but David talked them out of it. We hadn't actually ordered anything from the bar last night. This hotel's poached eggs were good but not quite as good as the ones at the Ibis in Paris.

Our first stop (not one of the tours) was of course another over-the-top gas station/store along the motorway. This one wasn't an Autogrille but a Chef Express. Before we even got inside, I was struck by this impressive array of R2D2-shaped recycle bins, from right to left: vetro (glass), lattine (cans), plastica (plastic packaging), carta (paper), and residuo ("unspecified," presumably everything else). You can see another such array in the distance to the left of this one—they were dotted all over the parking lot.

pastries marshmallows This place had most of the same sorts of things we'd seen in other, similar establishments—huge plastic jars of popcorn, six-foot stacks of giant chocolate bars, sandwiches, pizza, a wide variety of beer and soft drinks, colored pasta, pasta kits, all manner of chips and other salty snacks, chupa chups, cookies, wine, ice cream, etc., etc.

But here, two items in particular caught my eye: their particularly wide array of filled croissants (left) and their big jars of marshmallows (right).

In France, they make chocolate croissants by rolling croissant dough around a bar of chocolate and baking the whole thing, but in Italy, they start by baking big fluffy croisants, then shoving the pointy end of a pastry bag tip into the middle of each one and piping them full of chocolate filling, leaving a little glob of filling protruding form the hole to indicate the flavor. Doing it that way permits making filled croissants with a variety of flavors that wouldn't necessarily lend themselves to the French method.

Here, for example are, right to left, vegan multigrain (not filled), apricot, pistachio, Nutella (chocolate), Nutella and pistachio, and lemon. Out of the shot to the left, Bourbon vanilla pastry cream.

The marshmallows in the right-hand photo come in a variety of shapes, but I couldn't tell from the labels whether the were differently flavored. Visible here are white cyliders tinted pink on the outside, white "daisies" with pink centers, and strawberries; those red globs at the lower front are shaped like strawberries, each with a little green calyx. The label on the jar at the top right says "Happiness is in the shape of marshmallows." Behind them is the usual "tree" of giant chupa-chup lollipops (filled with regular-size chupa-chups) and beside those in the background, a wall of stacked Toblerone bars.

The amount of sugar consumed by Italians on road trips must be astounding.

On the drive, we saw a lot of orchards—kiwis, plums, peaches, apples. Some of the apple trees were heavily loaded with green apples. I think they were a green variety and not just unripe. Also lots of corn stubble and, under shade covers, what might have been tomatoes. Our route was in the Po River valley; it's been farmed for centuries. The river floods and bring fresh nutrients regularly.

Lots of other agriculture as well—a cabbagey kind of a field, gone to flower; a pretty weedy field with an underlayment of what could have been beans, also other low crops that could have been peanuts or soybeans. One field of some sort of low grain, sorghum maybe, or millet?

The fields started being lined with nut trees along the edges, and I saw many rows and stands of Lombardy poplars. One such stand, rows and rows, had been trimmed to form straight, thin stems with just a puff of foliage at the top.

We crossed a good-sized river; I wonder whether it was the Po. And the road was paralleled for a while by a canal or large irrigation ditch. A rectangular walled cemetery with a large columbarium. A genuine magpie, as opposed to the gray crows we've been seeing. A field of round hay bales. A truckload of live animals; I got only a glimpse of black and white fur. It could have been pigs or small cows.

Vineyards started to show up, mixed in with a little light industry, buildings with lots of stuff packaged in pallets. The yards started to feature nut and fig trees. Locust trees, which had been everywhere, were less common, and in the Chef Express parking lot was a little newly planted sapling that could have been a pepper tree, like the ones planted all over San Diego.

4 Madonne foyer Our first substantive top of the day was at the 4 Madonne cheese factory, where they make Parmesan. David and I have toured a number of cheese factories over the years, but never one for that kind of hard pâte cuite pressée style of cheese.

In the entrance hall was this carefully arranged table laden with antique cheese-making equipment.

Our tour started there, with some background information. For cheese, the designated area of production is the DOP. The DOP for Parmesan encompasses 300 factories and produces 4 million wheels per year. The milk comes from four breeds of cow: The black and white Holstein, the brown cow from Parma, the red cow from Reggiana, and the white cow from Modena. Holsteins are imported; the other three are native to the region. They're smaller than Holsteins, and each produces only 1/3 the volume of milk that a Holstein does.

Each wheel of Parmesan takes 45 gallons (= 360 lb) of milk. Holstein milk is quite fatty and protein rich, but not as much as the milk of the other breeds. Some specialist producers use only pure local milk from one or another of the native breeds (packaging it in a color to match the cow), but those cheese rarely make it out of Emilia; they're consumed locally.

Each wheel starts out weighing about 100 lb, but it loses weight during aging, dropping to about 80 lb after 8 years.

map cauldrons Here's an illustrated map of the region where cheese can be made and labeled "Parmigiano-Reggiano." At the lower right, above the drawing of cheese aging on shelves, Bologna is represented by two towers. Northwest of that, represented by a church, is Modena, and 4 Madonne is about three miles northwest of the center of Modena.

At the right here is the room where the cheese curd is made. Each of those copper-lined cauldrons is filled daily with 90 gallons of milk (half whole milk and half skimmed milk), enough for two wheels of Parmesan. (The cauldrons are set into the floor, so they are larger than they appear here.) Eight liters of whey from the previous batch (which contains the right bacterial culture for the cheese they're making, sort of like a sourdough starter) are added, together with rennet, the enzyme that causes the curds to coagulate and separate from the whey.

Each cauldron is copper lined and steam-jacketed, for temperature control. The mixture is heated gently and left to coagulate. When it has set, the contents of each cauldron is whisked, by hand, with a balloon whisk that looks just like the ones in my kitchen, except that it's six feet long! The whisking breaks the curd up into bits the size of rice, and the cauldron is further heated, causing the little curd bits to coalesce into a solid 200-lb glob in the bottom of the cauldron.

At the proper time in the afternoon, one worker uses a big wooden paddle to dig the ball of curds (the tour guide actually called it the ball of mozzarella!) out of the bottom. It floats to the top, where a second worker slides a net of cheese cloth under it and knots it at the top. Those globs are then hung on hooks on an overhead conveyer that moves them into the next room for molding.

This process goes on 365 days a year—the cows do not understand the concept of "weekends off." The morning milk is sent immediately to the factory and is used whole. The afternoon milk is skimmed and sent to the factory to be mixed with the next morning's batch of whole milk. The cream from the skimming is used to make butter.

molds band We arrived in time to see the last of the day's batch of curd being hauled out of the kettles in big cheesecloth bundles. You can see the last of them hanging from the conveyer near the top of the left-hand photo. In this room, The bundles are divided, and 100 lb of curd is plopped into each large cylindrical mold and topped with a 25-lb weight to begin the compression and drainage phase.

Meanwhile, the whey left behind in the cauldrons is drawn off for other uses: some is kept to serve as the next day's starter, some is used to make ricotta ("ricotta" means "recooked"; it makes use of the residual solids from the whey), and the rest is used to clean the walls, floors, and cauldron interiors before the next batch is started. This facility (number 1240) makes 104 wheels of cheese per day, every day.

The 25-lb weight stays on for a whole day. Each wheel gets flipped four times by hand on the first day as it drains; the cloth is changed each time.

At 8 pm, a marking belt is wrapped around each cheese. It stays on from 8 pm until 6 am. In the right-hand photo, our guide is holding up one of the facility's 104 marking belts.

band aging Here's a closer view of a section of the marking belt. It's entirely covered in tiny pegs that spell out "Parmigiano" and "Reggiano" all the way around. What looks like "900" is an upside down and backwards view of the abbreviation DOP. I didn't catch what the brightly colored numbers indicate, but that same number, "08 261" with "Italia" above and "CE" below appears on every wheel we got a close look at (my recorded note says something about "community certification in oval at the bottom," so that must be it). During the 10 hours the band is wrapped around the cheese, within the mold, it permanently embosses all those markings onto the cheese.

After that full day of draining and marking, they are transferred to the steel molds that give each wheel its characteristic shape, with curved, bulging sides. They stay in those molds for three days, being flipped over three times a day.

The next step is salting. The wheels, without their molds, are enclosed in cages and submerged for 18 days in a bring that is 25% salt. After 18 days, they will have developed a thin rind, but the salt will continue to penetrate from the rind into the interior of the cheese. Only after a year will the salt reach the center of the wheel, so a year is the minimum age at which a wheel of Parmesan is considered marketable.

aging close-up After salting, the aging process begins. The wheels are arranged on these rows of shelves, where they continue to lose moisture (though more slowly) while the salt creeps its way into the interior and the microorganisms (brought from the last batch with that 8 liters of whey) work their magic on flavor.

I didn't count the rows or estimate the depth of the room, but if they shipped out every cheese the moment they were allowed to (and they don't), that would be 104 cheeses per day for 365 days, so they'd need room for almost 40,000 wheels right there. Our guide said the "ordinary" age of the Parmesan they market is 40 months, so they're aging a lot of cheese in there.

The wheels continue to be turned regularly, but at this point the process is mechanized. A tall, narrow machine creeps up and down the rows, turning and brushing two wheels at a time and setting them back on the shelf. Each wheel gets that treatment about once a week.

At the right is a closer view of an aging wheel. You can see the markings embossed by the marking belt. The "1240" above the oval identifies the wheel as coming from this facility, and the date at the bottom shows that this wheel was made on 23 November, so it's almost a year old. The guide never mentioned why the markings stand out in contrasting color—whether they darken naturally or whether the wheels are, e.g., dusted with charcoal to darken them. The empty oval is where the inspector will put his "fire brand" if this wheel passes inspection and is deemed worthy of the label "Parmesan."

different ages earthquake The cheese facing each other across the aisle at the left are of different ages. The ones on the right are almost a year old (like the November 23 one shown above). Those on the left were made only this last 24 August and are still babies.

Finally, when the cheeses reach one year of age, they are inspected. Our guide emphasized a couple of time that no "spot checking" is involved. Each and every wheel produced in all 300 facilities in the region is individually inspected. The inspector first stands each wheel on edge and then taps all around both flat sides and around the rim with a small hammer, listening for imperfections like interior cracks or voids. If he detects no flaws, he applies his "fire brand" in the oval above the date and moves on to the next cheese.

Those that pass inspection can be sold immediately or aged further. A year-old wheel might sell for 100 euros. About 3000 euros for an eight-year-old one. There's no limit to the age, but an 8-year-old one would be very salty and intense. They recently sold a 27-year-old wheel.

Wheels that don't pass inspection are not discarded. They grind all the markings off the surface, and it becomes "generic cheese." It gets made into things like chips and cheese-flavored snacks.

The photo at the right is of a poster showing the aftermath of a 2005 earthquake. The proprietors gathered up all the damaged wheels, marketed them as "earthquake Parmesan," and used the proceeds to make the whole aging room earthquake proof so it wouldn't happen again!

food jam The tour was excellent and informative and ended with this tasting. Front to back, from the 12-month sticker, we have 12, 24, 36, and 48 month Holstein Parmesans; the one with the toothpick (back center) is a 2-year red cow Parmesan. On the bread is melted Parmesan; in the cup ricotta (made from the whey), with a tiny black plastic spoon stuck in it. At the bottom of the plate, in front of the bread, the rubbery cheese is trimmings from the wheel if it doesn't compress to exactly the right shape in the plastic mold. Sure enough, it had a texture like supermarket part-skim mozzarella.

The meats, back to front were prosciutto, mortadella, salami, and an odd crispy "cookie" of pork cracklings. The little jars in the right-hand photo held fruit mostarda, plum jam, and balsamic vinegar. All very tasty, and you could definitely distinguish among the cheeses of different ages.

hood garage Back in the bus once more, we headed into Modena, passing even more orchards, mostly apples. I generally associate Modena with production of balsamic vinegar (which it is justly famous for), but that's not where we were headed this time. Modena's other claim to fame is as the epicenter of Italian motor sports and home of a number of famous sports-car companies. On the way in, Maserati headquarters was pointed out to us, but we were headed instead for Ferrari.

The photo at the left, through the bus window is the roof of the Ferrari museum. From the right perspective, it's supposed to look like the hood of a Ferrari.

First, though, we started with the original Ferrari building (right-hand photo) across the courtyard from the museum. This was the home and workshop of mechanic Alfredo Ferrari (1859–1916), who did mechanical work for nearby railroads. He had two sons, Alfredo Jr. (called Alfredino or more often just Dino) and Enzo. Dino died at age 24 in 1916 in that year's flu epidemic, as did his father Alfredo, and it was Enzo who inherited the company and built the automobile manufacturing and racing empire.

F1 stradale The space that had been the workshop is now a museum of the company's most famous racing cars, like this skinny little red Formula 1 car.

The other one is the (apparently very famous) "SF90 Stradale." (I think a "stradale" is a car for use on the road, rather than just for racing, like the F1.) It's actually a plug-in hybrid. It retails for $300,000 to $400,000. Older models, like the F40 and F50, now classics, go at auction for up to $5 million.

I'm sure the exhibits would have meant much more to someone who (a) was into the finer points of high-performance internal-combustion engines and (b) followed the history of sports cars, but I was soon lost in the alphabet soup of model numbers, statistics of races I'd never heard of, and numbers of championships of this or that level won by the "Scuderia Ferrari" (i.e., the Ferrari stable). So I just concentrated on appreciating the cars as graceful sculptures.

Not all parts of all the cars are still built in Modena—the company has plants in other Italian cities—but key components are still made here.

aerial view windows Here's a model of the museum building, where you can see the car-hood shape. The white L-shaped building is the house and workshop we had just toured.

We walked across the courtyard and entered through the curved dark wall (right-hand photo). That wall consists entirely of windows, and the original plan was for the whole museum to be lit only by natural light coming in through them. That turned out to work a little too well, sort of like a reflector oven under arc lights, so some changes were made. Shades were added, and a wall was built to separate the lobby/gift shop just inside the windows from the rest of the museum. The part behind that wall is still one large open space, but some artificial lighting had to be added.

 

 

Written 3 February 2025

trinkets car In the gift shop, you can buy everything Ferrari, from jackets, shirts, and hats to hubcaps, shot glasses, hood ornaments, gear-shift handles, and the sort of trinkets shown here in the left-hand photo—lanyards, lapel pins, key chains, and match-box Ferraris. I suspect that if you wanted to buy an actual full-size car there, they would escort you into a nearby conference room to settle the details. A snack bar serves lunch for those who want to stay all day.

Suspended above was this sleek blue speedster. What doesn't show is the drogue chute deployed behind it!

design car spider This mustard-yellow car was billed as illustrating the design process. I don't know whether the designer uses a big magic marker on a life-size model car, whether this is a 3-D rendering of a designer's drawing, or what.

At the right here is a model I found especially attractive. According to the label the gentleman in the photo is studying, it's a 1986 Ferrari Testarossa Spider. (Convertibles are apparently called "spiders" because the fold-down tops of old phaeton carriages were thought to resemble spiders. I don't know why "Testarossa," which means redhead.) It's a 180-degree V12, 4943 cc, has 390 horsepower at 6300 rpm, has five speeds plus reverse, and can go 290 km/hour.

Many other models were on display—the huge (though elegantly shaped) barn of a room was littered with cars, including some unusual ones. For example, the "212 inter" was one of the first with actual luggage space—it had a small trunk. The "SP2" has no windscreen, but the purchase price includes a couple of helmets and some gloves. The side and rear windows of the "KC23" are blacked out; it has a rear-view video camera rather than a mirror. The "A12" has 800 horsepower. Every year on 18 February (Enzo's birthday), they change the exhibition to a new assortment.

paint fabric Three levels of customization are available to the serious Ferrari customer. I forget what they called them, but even the lowest level involves travelling to one of three Ferrari studios around the world to consult with designers.

At the lowest level, you can choose the color of the car (left) and the colors of the fabrics/leathers (right) used in the interior, as well as details like the style of steering wheel and hubcaps.

At the second level, you can fiddle with more important things like which engine you get, and details of exterior ornamentation.

details one-off At the top level, you actually have to qualify—for example, you must already have owned a Ferrari for a while. At that level you can customize everything except basic body shape, and the product is guaranteed to be entirely unique in the world, a one-off that will never be repeated.

An example is this custom one-off (right) built for a client in Hong Kong, strictly for track use—it's not street legal, since it has no headlights.

Other random info our guide covered:

The tour ended with a video presentation celebrated Enzo as doing just about everything except walking on water, with Pavarotti singing triumphant arias from Turandot in the background. Very impressive.

tools pots Back in the faithful bus, we made the short trip to a balsamic-vinegar producer, Acetaia Boni, about five miles south of Modena. As you can see, the walls of the high-ceilinged lobby were heavily adorned with farming and cooking implements, including, suspended high overhead, a double row of iron pots.

 

 

barrels food Here's the proprietor, holding forth in the production room. I'm sorry to have caught him in such an unflattering pose. Just Google "acetaia boni" for a much better photo.

He is standing behind a row of small barrels of graduated size—not all of them are within the frame—used to produce traditionally aged balsamic vinegar. It's a long process. Each barrel is made from a different kind of wood, imparting a slightly different flavor element to the finished product. Each barrel has a rectangular hole, maybe the size of my hand, cut in the top. Those holes are never stoppered; a piece of cloth is draped over each one, just to keep dust and insects out. To start a series, you fill the largest barrel with "cooked" grape juice in winter, drape cloth over its opening, and go away for a year. The following year, you fill the next largest barrel with juice from the largest (now somewhat concentrated by evaporation over the summer), then top up the largest with more cooked grape juice. A year after that, you fill the next barrel in line from the second, refill the second from the first, and top up the first with cooked grape juice again. You continue that way until, at the end of year 12, you have a small barrel (at the end of the line) of 12-year-old balsamic vinegar— the minimal age for the traditionally produced product. Twenty percent of it is bottled, then the little barrel topped up from the next largest as usual.

Traditionally inclined families start a series when a baby is born, so that he or she will have an established series when old enough to marry and establish a new household. What I'm not sure of is whether, if you continue the process in the original 12 barrels for another 18 years, the vinegar in the smallest barrel counts as 30 years old or whether you need a longer series of barrels to produce the older (and thus higher-quality) vinegars. The owner spoke of a 100-year-old series somewhere behind him, started by his grandfather in 1888 and still going.

In any case, at around 25 years, the vinegar thickens up and is considered of much higher quality. The balsamic vinegars in American supermarkets are nowhere near that. The 30-year mark seems to be the point of diminishing returns, where additional aging makes less and less difference.

Of course, we got a chance to sample the product. Our first plate included a chunk of 25-year-old Parmesan cheese with drops of 30-year vinegar on it. Wow. That was accompanied by a little square of a traditional pie of the region, filled with greens of some sort (I've read about an Italian pie filled with Swiss chard; maybe it was that) and a quiche-like square, also topped with vinegar.

food food The second plate included sedanini pasta, mortadella, salami, the pork-cracklings cookie again, and foccaia. While we ate it, the owner made a salad, tossing greens for the whole group with olive oil and, he emphasized, only 1 tablespoon of the 30-year vinegar. That and a splodge of extra vinegar was added to our plates.

Also on the table was Modena bensone cake, a crumbly not-very-sweet cake that resembled biscotti before the second baking. He mentioned that it's good dipped in Lambrusco wine, but we of course had it drizzled with vinegar.

We finished up with vanilla gelato drizzled with vinegar. Yummy!

The vinegar was indeed delicious. I recall a colleague's story from his youth—his family kept a cruet of good balsamic vinegar on the table, which had to be refilled periodically from a barrel in the cellar. When, as a boy, he was sent from the table to refill the cruet, his father insisted that he whistle audibly all the way there and back, proving that he was not pausing on the way to drink the stuff straight.

This maker's total annual production is only 24 to 28 gallons a year of very good and very expensive vinegar (the bottles with gold caps are those with 25-year or older product), not enough to sustain the operation. The maker therefore supplements his income by selling "cooked" grape juice to locals who use it to make their own. He uses a mixture of Trebbiano and Lambrusco grapes (I didn't think to ask whether he grows and presses his own grapes; we saw no vines near the building). The juice is heated to just 100oF and held there for 10–12 hours—easy with the right equipment but very difficult in the ordinary home kitchen.

What we did see around the building were fields and fields of sour cherry trees. The other supplement to the owner's income is sale of sour cherries to the locals for use in jam.

Danny frequently presented us with swag from our various stops, and back on the bus after this one, he gave us each a tiny bottle of 30-year vinegar. Best swag yet!

On our final bus trip of the day, into the city of Bologna, we passed one field of gone-by sunflowers and several more net-covered orchards. Some fields were covered with what looked like lucerne (aka alfalfa, Medicago sativa), a low-growing legume that makes good hay. Also something tall and shaggy like asparagus, but I don't think it was asparagus—maybe dill or fennel?

On the outskirts of the city, we passed a big Ikea installation and might have been some carob trees! Strangely, in the course of a day spent driving the entire length of the region famous for Parmesan, we didn't see a single cow.

hotel hotel Our hotel was the Grand Hotel Majestic già Baglioni. Now I knew "già" means little girl (from all those Già Russa Italian products in my supermarket), so I asked the hotel staff. In this case, it means "formerly called." Apparently the Grand Hotel Majestic is the "daughter" of the Baglioni Hotel.

As you can see from these photos of a hallway and the bed in my room, it's another grande dame of the local hotel industry. It's the only five-star luxury (the extra "L" on the five-star sign out front) in Emilia-Romagna.

courtyard tower After a little time to settle in and a chance to hang out for a while in this little raised interior courtyard that opened off our hallway, we convened for another guided tour (our fourth of the day, if you're keeping track), this one of the hotel itself.

From a window, we could glimpse this tower, which I think is the one that's part of the city's Museum of Medieval Art.

This area was home to the iron-age Villanovan culture (ca. 900–700 BC), part of the Estruscan civiliation, older than Rome. Around 19 BC, a roman with the middle name Emilia built Emilia Street, the main road of the Emilia-Romagna region. Bologna (called Felsina by the Etruscans but Bononia by the Romans) was located at its intersection with another Roman road.

In 1088 AD, the University of Bologna was founded, the oldest in the world. Currently, it has 100,000 students here. I don't know whether the town's population of 375,000 people includes the students or not.

The front part of our hotel, where we entered and our rooms were located, was built in 1732 by Benedict XIV (one of five popes from Bologna) as a seminary for young priests. Another pope from Bologna was Gregory XIII, who was responsible for the Gregorian calendar. There's a big statue of him on the town hall, prominently labeled "San Petronio." Napoleon was coming, and he was destroying statues of popes, so the town "disguised" the statue as a local patron saint to save it from that fate.

The seminary building became a hotel in 1912. Being the best one around, it was commandeered to serve as Nazi headquarters during WWII. Bologna was one of the last towns to be liberated. The partisans put a big bomb in the reception area that blew out the arches in the front and killed the nazis they were after.

The back side of the hotel is even older. It was the Palazzo Fava. Now 20% of it is part of the hotel, and the remaining 80% houses the city's museum of medieval art. It's Conoscenti Tower is one of the 20–25 towers remaining in the city. A thousand years ago, about 200 towers were located in the city (which was only a mile across!), but the government has knocked most of them down to make space for other buildings. No building stone was available nearby, so they were all built of brick made from the local clay soil. The city's nickname was "the forest of towers." Many were connected by wooden bridges above street level.

Two of the remaining towers have become a symbol of the city—remember the two towers representing Bologna on the map of the Parmesan region, above? And, our guide emphasized, all the towers lean; one of them leans 3.5 m, farther than the one in Pisa. The one exception that does not lean doesn't rest on the ground. It sits solidly on the foundations of a corner of the old Roman town wall, so naturally, it's not going anywhere. Those Roman builders really knew what they were doing.

Another favorite son of Bologna was Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of wireless communications. Our guide assured us that his daughter, named (what else?) Electra, is still alive at the age of 100 and living in New York.

fresco fresco These two frescos are among those located in the hotel itself. The one at the left is yet another variation on the abduction of Europa—she waves gaily over her shoulder to her friends on shore—and the other, only discovered under a layer of plaster five or six years ago, is of Hercules slaying Cerberus.

Both are by the Carracci brothers, Annibale and Agostino, and their cousin Ludovico (active around the turn of the 17th century). As our guide explained, the Roman style of art paid no attention at all to background scenery or to the scale of human figures in relation to it, whereas the Venetians liked perspective and colors and the environment, so the Carraccis combined the two. They founded a school, and all the other artists working locally came from that school. They were apparently hugely influential on succeeding generations. At least one of the Carracci murals in the hotel is a year older than the ones in the art museum.

Other things our guide told us in the course of the tour: