I set off from my little home this morning intent on Post Office first then a museum before coffee. That resolve went out the window after the first bar I passed. I had bought some postcards and stamps the previous day and the guy in the shop told me I did not need airmail stickers on them. Maybe not but I thought I would ask. There was a huge queue in the PO – people sitting on chairs holding their numbers and assorted different windows around this large room - and I was about to abandon that idea when I was accosted by a large lady who was there to direct you to the right place ( I think). I asked in my best Italian if I needed airmail stickers and she said yes, go to window 6. There was nobody at window 6, everyone watched me ( lucky I had my Pink shirt on and the nicer of my black pants) as I appeared to queue jump and I stood at window 6. After a little while I started to more away - how long was I supposed to wait ? – the lady saw me and called out in a loud voice ‘Stay there senora, someone will come soon’ ( I think) So everyone stopped their chattering and stared at me again. Finally someone came and gave me some stickers. I thought I better buy a few more stamps to make the whole thing worthwhile.
First off was the castle. It is a bit odd – sitting in the middle of town. I had been wondering why it was vaguely familiar and I read that it was designed by the same guy who designed Mantua’s castle10 years later. ( Mantua was 1 of the places I went to in 2007 and is also in the Po valley) I wandered through the rooms, some small, some huge, some plain, some with ornate frescoed ceilings. I get a bit annoyed by some museums in the less well frequented by English speakers places which have fairly poor translations. Sometimes it takes a while to work out to. One sign said ‘the river Po flew past..’. I suppose thinking ‘flew’ was the past tense of ‘flow’ is reasonable, but any English speaker would have picked that up. The whole Este family is a bit confusing and different members all seemed to add a bit to the castle, then a lot of it fell down in an earthquake. Still, I enjoyed myself pottering around. Lucrezia Borgia was married to one of the Estes. He was her 3rd husband. She was married to someone when she was 13, then again to someone else, then for the 3rd time to the Este when she was 22. She died in childbirth when she was 39. She had 6 living children from her 3rd marriage, but how many others before that? And how many pregnancies that did not result in a live child? What a life some women had to lead. And she did not have any housework to do.
This was the first museum with frescoed ceilings I have been in that had on the floor large slanted mirrors that you could look at without twisting your neck to see the ceiling, but I found them quite off putting, so now have a sore neck.
After that it was clearly time for another coffee before moving onto the next museum. This was the Cathedral museum. Sometime ago, they took out the valuable things from the cathedrl, put them in a separate place and charge people to look at them. There was not another tourist in the place and , in the main room, there were 3 attendants watching me carefully. Bit off putting. There were 8 large wall hangings depicting the lives of St George ( he who slayed the dragon) and St Maurelio ( both patron saints of Ferrara) . The blurb said the murals were designed to aid quiet contemplation. Pity the people who were trying to quietly contemplate when sitting next to 2 of the 8 – both guys got beheaded.
In another room there were some very intricately embroidered old vestments and in another some very old illuminated hymn books – the ones with only 4 lines.
I then walked to a restaurant near where I am staying . It had a fixed priced menu for lunch and , although good value, it is only good value if you want to eat ( and drink) that much food. I must remember that tomorrow. Apart from me and a father and his daughter, all the rest were local workmen and regulars. At one point there was a discussion between the proprietor and the people sitting at several tables as to whether it was tagliatelle or whether it was tagliatine or tagliatelline or tagliafino( I think a made up word because it was home made , they had the wrong cutter or something like that)
After a whileI set off again. My cathedral museum ticket covered 3 other museums so I thought I should at least look at 1 of them. It was on the far side of town – a Palazzino or small palace. Or large house. It had furniture that reminded me of one of the places I went to in Edinburgh – large, dark wood and uncomfortable looking. Once again, I was the only person looking and there were several attendants. One followed me for a few rooms and passed me onto another who followed me. There were some fragments of mosaics from the floor which she drew my attention to. I made suitable appreciative noises then asked her if she knew of Piazza Armerina in Sicily.( John and I had been there in 2003 – a huge house has been excavated and you walk around it on elevated walkways to avoid the almost complete Roman era mosaic floor) She clearly did – she talked to me about it for a while but another person came along which was good because I was struggling to keep up. Then I went to the Palazzo Schifanoia. Schifanoia means to prevent boredo. The Palazzo was built by 1 of the Estes. About all that remains are some old walls and a big room with many frescoes. But it was dark and oppressively hot. Before you got to that you had to go through many smaller rooms with, as far as I could gather ( there were no English signs) a variety of different people’s collections of odd things. There were some old coins from Ferrara, some ivory carvings from Goa, some wooden carved creatures with Egyptian hieroglyphics, some more illuminated music books,etc Enthusiastic I was not. I should have remembered from my last trip that 2 museums a day is about enough, maybe 3 but not 4.
I sat on the exit steps for a while deciding what to do – you guessed it – a drink. I found a nice place with not too many people and had a drink . The nibbles were a bit upmarket from the chips of the day before. They were 1 cm3 of puff pastry with a bit of anchovy or nut or cheese on the top. I sat there for an hour, went in and paid and realized it was a pasticceria as well so asked about a speciality of Ferrara – pampepato. The book describes this as a gingerbread cake stuffed with nuts and covered in dark chocolate. I bought 1 - quite small done up in a little parcel. That will do nicely for dinner with stale bread and tomatoes, I thought. Plus the apples and nectarines – still plenty of those.
I watched the same Italian quiz show as the day before and am beginning to get the hang of it. Nothing like anything I have seen on Australian TV. I remember watching Who wants to be a Millionaire with John in 2003. Deciphering the answers was the easier bit. We had to use the answers to work out what the question was.
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