One Room in Bologna, Five Cities a Week

Most travellers give Bologna two nights, eat extremely well, walk a few kilometres of portico and move on to Florence. That is a reasonable itinerary and a wasted opportunity, because the city's strongest argument is not gastronomic but geographical. Keep one room here for a week and you can still wake up somewhere different every morning, with no second hotel booking and no car.

The regional shorthand is a ribbon of towns strung along a single Roman road. The Via Emilia does run more or less straight from Rimini to Piacenza by way of Imola, Faenza, Forlì, Cesena, Bologna, Modena, Reggio Emilia and Parma, and several of the trips below sit on it. But the two we rate most highly do not. Ferrara is some 45 kilometres north of the road, out on the Po plain; Ravenna lies off to the east, on the flat ground behind the Adriatic. Bologna earns its keep as a base not because it sits in the middle of one line, but because it is the junction where that Roman road crosses the routes running north towards Ferrara, Padua and Venice and east towards Ravenna and the coast.

What follows is about the ring rather than the city: what is genuinely in reach, how long each place takes, which deserve a full day, which are a half, and how to sequence a week so you are not standing on a platform at the wrong hour.

Where the lines actually go

Bologna Centrale is where the Milan to Rome high-speed line meets the older routes east to the Adriatic and north into the Po plain, and the practical consequence is that several regional corridors leave the same concourse throughout the day. In round numbers, on regional services rather than the fast trains: Modena is roughly twenty to thirty-five minutes; Ferrara about half an hour on the quicker workings and nearer fifty on the stoppers; Faenza roughly forty minutes to an hour; Parma about an hour to an hour and a quarter; Ravenna an hour to an hour and twenty.

Rimini is the one people misjudge. Ordinary regional trains commonly take an hour and twenty to an hour and three-quarters, and only the fastest Regionale Veloce or a booked high-speed service comes near the hour, so do not file it mentally alongside Faenza. Florence, through the Apennine tunnels, is around thirty-five to forty minutes on the high-speed line, which is less than some Bolognese spend getting to work.

Two points about tickets. Regional fares in Emilia-Romagna are banded by distance, so Bologna to Modena and Bologna to Ravenna are nowhere near the same money. What they are not is yield-managed: the price does not climb as the date approaches, there is no seat reservation, and the ticket buys travel between two named points rather than a place on a particular train. That is the flexibility high-speed travel does not give you. Decide over breakfast, board whatever is next. Buy singles rather than hunting for a regional tourist pass; if a promotion is offered at the counter, weigh it against the number of journeys you will actually make.

The station is fifteen to twenty minutes on foot from the centre, much of it sheltered, and there is usually a left-luggage office if your arrival and departure days are awkward. The airport is linked to the station by the Marconi Express, an elevated people mover; the ride typically takes under ten minutes, and it costs considerably more than a city bus ticket, so check the current fare rather than trusting a figure in an article.

The half-hour ring: Modena and Ferrara

Modena rewards a specific order. Go early and start at Mercato Albinelli, the covered market in its inter-war iron-and-glass hall, because markets here are a morning proposition and generally wind down by early afternoon. Then Piazza Grande, the Duomo and the leaning Ghirlandina bell tower, which UNESCO lists together as one site. The Galleria Estense, in the Palazzo dei Musei, holds the collection the Este dukes brought with them when they lost Ferrara, and it is a serious two hours rather than a quick look.

Now the day forks, and the honest advice is not to fight it. There are two Ferrari museums: the Museo Enzo Ferrari in Modena, built around the house where Enzo Ferrari was born and roofed with a great yellow aluminium shell, and the Museo Ferrari at Maranello, some eighteen kilometres south. A shuttle bus links the two sites and a combined ticket covering both is usually sold, but confirm the departure point, the frequency and how long the ticket stays valid on the museums' own channel before you build an afternoon around it. The round trip plus two collections is a half-day at the very least. A morning of market, piazza and cathedral followed by the Galleria Estense is a full day; so is a morning in town followed by the cars. Attempting all of it is the sort of plan that ends with a taxi fare from Maranello you will resent. Balsamic acetaie sit in the hills outside town and generally need booking and transport: a lovely half-day, a poor improvisation.

Ferrara is flat, quiet and organised around bicycles, so hire one near the station. Roughly nine kilometres of Renaissance brick walls survive, reduced from a longer original circuit, with a green path along the top that is the standard ride. Do not expect an unbroken car-free lap. Continuity was interrupted in the southern sector by a papal fortress built in the early seventeenth century, and the path is crossed by public roads at the city gates, so ride it as a sequence of long green stretches instead.

Inside the walls the Este city is unusually legible. The moated Castello Estense sits in the middle, the medieval tangle of Via delle Volte to the south, and Biagio Rossetti's grid of the Addizione Erculea to the north, with the diamond-point facade of Palazzo dei Diamanti at the hinge. Two interiors justify the trip on their own: the Salone dei Mesi at Palazzo Schifanoia, frescoed by Francesco del Cossa and his circle, and MEIS, the national museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah, in a former prison. The cathedral facade has spent years under restoration; check its current state before planning a photograph around it. Note also that the Castello typically closes on Tuesdays rather than Mondays, so confirm the day before you fix it.

An hour or so: Ravenna, and the case for Parma

Given one day trip and no more, we would spend it on Ravenna. Eight early Christian and Byzantine monuments are inscribed by UNESCO, but they are not all inside a walkable centre, whatever the shorthand suggests: Sant'Apollinare in Classe stands a few kilometres south of the city and the Mausoleum of Theodoric is outside the historic walls. The rest do cluster. San Vitale and the small Mausoleum of Galla Placidia share a garden; Sant'Apollinare Nuovo and the Neonian Baptistery are a few minutes apart; Dante's tomb stands beside the Franciscan basilica where his funeral was held.

Book before you travel. A combined ticket covers a cluster of the monuments, and access to Galla Placidia is capped and timed for at least part of the year, with a supplement, to protect the mosaics' microclimate; the same arrangement can apply to the Neonian Baptistery. The regime varies with the season, so check the official ticketing channel first, and if slots are being sold for your dates, fix them before you choose a train. Give the whole thing a day rather than a morning. Classe is reachable by local bus from the centre, and the Classis museum there tells the story of the vanished Roman port.

Parma, west along the Roman road, is the quieter proposition. Correggio's Assumption fills the cathedral dome in a spiral of limbs that the sixteenth century took a while to forgive; Antelami's octagonal baptistery in pink Verona marble stands beside it; and inside the Palazzo della Pilotta the Teatro Farnese, a vast timber theatre rebuilt after wartime bombing, feels like walking into a woodcut. Prosciutto and Parmigiano producers are out in the countryside, run to a dairy's schedule that usually starts uncomfortably early, and need booking and transport.

South and west into the hills

Everything above is plain. The Apennines begin immediately south of the city and the Porrettana railway climbs into them from the same station. Get off at Pontecchio Marconi, a separate settlement within the comune of Sasso Marconi with its own halt, for Villa Griffone, where according to the foundation that runs it Guglielmo Marconi carried out his early wireless experiments; it is now a museum, with visits generally by appointment. Alighting at Sasso Marconi itself leaves you several kilometres short of the door.

Marzabotto holds the excavated Etruscan city of Kainua and its national museum, and above it the Parco Storico di Monte Sole, where German forces killed approximately 770 civilians between late September and early October 1944. This was not one ridge and one morning: the killings ran across the comuni of Marzabotto, Monzuno and Grizzana Morandi at more than a hundred separate locations. The park is walking country and a memorial at once, and the two cannot be separated.

Further up the same line, from the station at Riola, is Rocchetta Mattei, the neo-Moorish castle built by Count Cesare Mattei for his own system of medicine. Visits are guided and booked in advance, and opening tends to concentrate on weekends and holidays, which means the castle dictates the shape of your week rather than the other way round. Check the official channel rather than a listing site.

East of the city, a local bus climbs from Imola to Dozza, a hilltop village that has been inviting artists to paint its house walls since the 1960s, with the regional wine collection in the cellars of the Rocca. Services on routes like this thin out at weekends and in the evening, so read the operator's timetable in both directions before committing. Beyond Faenza and its international ceramics museum, Brisighella sits beneath three separate hilltops, a clock tower, a fortress and a sanctuary, and keeps a raised, covered medieval lane known as the Via degli Asini. Bologna to Faenza is roughly thirty-five to sixty minutes and the branch onwards about ten, but only a handful of services a day work that branch, so the wait at Faenza rather than the running time decides the day. Plan around the branch timetable, not around a door-to-door total.

West, a suburban line leaves Bologna through Casalecchio and then runs south-west along the foothills to Vignola, roughly twenty-seven kilometres away. That is due west and marginally south of the city, not north-west, which is open plain towards Modena and the Po. The cherry orchards flower in early spring and the medieval Rocca is the town's landmark. One caution worth carrying: the celebrated oval staircase associated with Jacopo Barozzi, the architect who took his professional name from the town, is in a palazzo in the historic centre and not inside the fortress, a confusion that has sent plenty of visitors to the wrong ticket desk. Some services run through from Bologna Centrale and others involve a change at Casalecchio, so read the timetable properly.

Walking out instead of riding back

The Via degli Dei runs about 130 kilometres from Piazza Maggiore to Piazza della Signoria in Florence, over the Apennine watershed by way of Sasso Marconi, Madonna dei Fornelli, the Futa Pass and San Piero a Sieve, with stretches of exposed Roman paving on the ridge. Most walkers take five or six days; cyclists do it in two or three. Accommodation on the middle stages is limited and books out in the good months, which are the same months that suit Bologna itself, late spring and early autumn. The pleasing absurdity is the return: a train back under the mountains you spent most of a week crossing, in around half an hour.

Building the week

Count the nights properly, because this is where hub itineraries usually fall over. Six nights gives you an arrival day, five full days and a departure morning. Five nights gives four full days, so trim the list rather than the sleep.

Day one, Modena: market and cathedral in the morning, then either the Galleria Estense or the two Ferrari museums, not both. Day two, Ravenna, with the Galla Placidia arrangement checked and, if slots apply to your dates, booked before you leave home. Day three, the hills, and this is the day the calendar chooses for you: Rocchetta Mattei concentrates its visits on weekends and holidays, so if your free day falls midweek, take Imola and Dozza instead and check the bus in both directions. Day four, Ferrara and a bicycle, avoiding Tuesday. Day five, Parma or Florence, according to whether you want another Emilian city or a change of register.

Then consider not coming back at all. Rather than radiating from one base all week, many people do better splitting the trip: four nights in Bologna and two in Ravenna or Ferrara, leaving eastwards through Rimini, where the Arch of Augustus, the Tiberius bridge and the Fellini museum make an unhurried half-day and buses climb to San Marino in about an hour, or northwards to Venice. Be honest about the cost. That is six nights against five, an extra room as well as an extra booking. What it buys is several return legs you no longer have to ride.

What goes wrong

Last services back from Ravenna, from the Faenza branch and from the hill stations run out earlier than the Modena timetable might lead you to expect; look up your specific return on the operator's site before you order a second glass of anything. National rail strikes are announced in advance and run to guaranteed-service bands, so they are survivable if you look them up rather than discover them.

Closing days need care rather than a rule of thumb. Many civic museums close on Mondays and church-run sites often do not, which is why Monday can suit Ravenna; but Ferrara's Castello Estense typically shuts on Tuesdays, so anyone who converts that pattern into a rule and avoids Ferrara on Monday arrives on precisely the wrong day. Check each site you actually care about for the week you are travelling, the same way you would check Rocchetta Mattei or the Maranello shuttle.

August empties the cities of the people who make them worth visiting, and a great many family-run places shut for a fortnight. And resist hiring a car for the plain: it buys nothing the train does not, and Bologna's historic centre is a camera-enforced restricted traffic zone that will send you a fine months later, at home, in Italian. Hire one for the hills, for a day, and give it back.