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The tour will start picking you up from the dock or other places you arrive.
Bologna is the undisputed food capital of Italy, but to work up an appetite there are plenty of sights to visit, beginning with an arduous climb up 498 steps to the top of the 100-metre Torre Asinelli, a 12th-century skyscraper. One reason Bologna is so lively is its huge student population: its university is the oldest in the world, dating back to 1088. Visitors are allowed into the old university library, where the ceilings are decorated with flamboyant frescoes, and into the dramatic 1637 anatomical theatre, where bodies used to be dissected.
The city is criss-crossed by some 50km of portici, stately arcades lined with cafes, bars and boutiques. Portico Cavour is for those looking for designer labels, while the Portico Nanni is the place to browse for Italian cookbooks.
Bologna is trattoria heaven, with huge portions of classic cucina casalinga (home cooking), such as handmade tagliatelle smothered with ragù bolognese that has simmered for hours, or tiny tortellini floating in a capon broth.
Second stop in Ferrara. Everything in Ferrara seems to have the stamp of the all-powerful Este family on it. Their moated ducal castle dominates the town center, and almost every museum and tourist attraction is housed in a palace built by some member of this eccentric dynasty that ruled this part of the Po Valley throughout the Renaissance. UNESCO named Ferrara’s old center, which includes the magnificent Castello Estense and the 12th-century Duomo, a World Heritage Site as “…a fine example of a town planned in the Renaissance that has managed to retain the integrity of its historic centre.”
As you stroll its streets and look inside its palaces, you can almost imagine yourself transported back to the era when Medieval was giving way to Renaissance Italy. Because so many Este palaces were surrounded by gardens that have survived as parks, Ferrara is one of Italy’s greenest cities. Its location in the fertile Po Valley, close to Bologna – considered by many to be Italy’s culinary capital – means that you can expect to find excellent restaurants serving local products.
Close to the castle and also included in the UNESCO site, Ferrara Cathedral is an architectural image of the city’s history. Its façade moves from a Romanesque lower tier, built in the early 1100s, upward to a beautiful early Gothic loggia from the 1500s. The imposing pink-and-white-marble bell tower is in the Renaissance style. Along the side facing Piazza Trento Trieste, the Loggia of the Merchants has housed shops since medieval times, and above it are two colonnaded galleries. Stop for a close look at the extraordinary Last Judgment carved in stone above the façade’s central loggia. Righteous souls, gowned and crowned, march off to paradise, while the naked damned are shoved into a boiling caldron or into the mouth of a monster by a gleeful devil. The work’s imaginative sculptor remains unknown.
Unless you’re a great fan of ecclesiastical art, the museum’s main attraction is that it is arranged to give a good picture of Renaissance Ferrara’s splendor. Especially beautiful are the early-13th-century tiles, a set of 15th-century anthem books illuminated by Jacopo Filippo Medici and other artists, and the extraordinary organ shutters showing Saint George and the Dragon and the Annunciation. A must in Ferrara moreover is the Archaeological Musem, a beautiful 15th-century Renaissance palace with a courtyard and frescoes that are early examples of trompe-l’oeil (“fool the eye”) painting. Its splendid collections are mostly finds from burial sites at the nearby Greek-Etruscan city of Spina.
The Palazzo dei Diamanti is hard to miss, with its entire exterior covered in more than 8,500 faceted marble blocks. This unusual (and famous) example of early Renaissance architecture was, like the palace of Ludovico il Moro, part of Duke Ercole I d’Este’s Addizione Erculea (Herculean Addition), a plan to remake Ferrara in the late 1400s. Today, the palace contains the Pinacoteca Nazionale (National Gallery), with works by 13th- to 17th-century painters of the Ferrara school, and on the upper floor, changing exhibitions in the Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea feature major works by impressionists, post impressionists, and other later artists. Before we take you back on board we’ll offer a quick city tour of Ravenna