Ham from Heaven, and Bologna the city (not the meat)

Culatello. Cool-ah-tell-oh.

The name means "little butt", and the Parmigiani are connoisseurs of it. It's the king here, not prosciutto.

Unfortunately because it's still produced using traditional (read: "unsanitary" by U.S. declaration, although it's been consumed here for hundreds of years and doesn't make anybody sick) methods, it's ILLEGAL to export to the U.S.

Culatello is about 100 Euro/kilogram over here, and the typical one is 3-5 kilos and about the size of a small football. A $400-$700 football after conversion - and keep in mind, we're in the epicenter of where it's made. Emily and I bought 4 paper-thin slices, for which we paid about $6.

And after sampling with some pears and parmigiano-reggiano cheese, I can say this - they know what they're doing over here.

The other day we went to Bologna, to check it out. It's much bigger than Parma, and is the site of the world's first university which is still one of Europe's largest.

Since we arrived at about 1pm, we started off with lunch.

For an appetizer we shared some fried carciofi (artichokes):

Emily had tagliatelle with ragu Bolognese:

And I had coniglio (rabbit) with black truffle sauce and polenta:

It was all very good, and after the accompanying full bottle of red wine we were ready to explore!

First we walked over to the Piazza Maggiore, which is basically the center of town. There is a HUGE church there:

It seemed like everywhere we looked, there was amazing architecture in Bologna.

Check out these marble sculptures in front of a random building - they were incredible.

I also saw a LOT more motorcycles and scooters there than I've seen in Parma or Modena, which was exciting for me:

After some quick cafe macchiati, we got adventurous and climbed to the top of an ancient tower that dominates the city's skyline...it was only 3 Euro!

Rickety old staircase of the tower - trusting your life to this thing as you climb several hundred feet up is even scarier than it looks:

View from the top, the gigantic building is a church from the 1500s

Did I mention that these towers lean? A LOT? This shot is looking straight down at the neighboring tower - it's not open to the public, for obvious reasons.

After the tower, we'd had enough excitement for a while and decided to check out what Bologna is really famous for - the food, of course. The various markets there were incredible.

Frutti di mare....yum.

On one street there were several outdoor fish markets, quite different than Parma as we've only seen a few fish markets here. There were SO many varieties of fish, most of which we had never heard of before:

This just about sums it up, doesn't it?

Stopped by the Piazza Maggiore one more time on our walk back to the train station, it was gorgeous at dusk. We loved Bologna!