Bologna feels old, older than Florence. A mere 37-minute train ride from the touristy Florence, Bologna had its heyday a couple of centuries before the Renaissance.

But arriving in Bologna from the U.S. late yesterday, we are swept up by a cool NOW feeling. The holiday lights and young crowds make the streets seem as contemporary as the bright hipness we saw in San Antonio’s Pearl Brewery district a week ago. Unmarried couples kiss nuzzlingly, waiting for buses and bicycles (electric or acoustic) to speed by with a green light. Braver souls cross the street on red.

No cars. People. Italian people, it seems. And they are enjoying wide tiled sidewalks under amazing porticos that arch overhead 25 or 30 feet high.

I portichi de Bologna! They turn these sidewalks into endlessly telescoping tunnels of ancient (and a few modern) architectural styles. Columns along the side are gothic, Greek or straight functional. The ceilings are barrel roof or vaulted, as if samples of Byzantine or Romanesque interiors. (You can see such an interior in the Cathedral of St. Peter opened to us on one of these streets.) Between the porticos, some street lanes are assigned to bikes and walkers while trolley tracks are being updated. The bright shop windows advertise luscious models of Gucci or Prada. 

If it were raining or snowing (it’s not), you could walk 40 miles in this city – even up to the basilica of San Luca on the wooded hill overlooking the city – and never get wet. Except when crossing the streets, of course.

The porticos were mandated by a city ordinance in 1288 A.D. Any new building had to accommodate the residents passing by. It’s hard to know whether any 13^th century Trumpian resistance or ambitious developers complained of this oppressive regulation.

But they lived with it, and it was a great balance of Bologna’s growth as an early mercantile center and the common good (with the public University here being the oldest continuously functioning university in the world).

There’s a lesson here, somewhere, for American cities and politicians. As we think of economic recovery, let’s not forget the common good and infrastructure with a touch of beauty. And let’s remember the future, even a future a few centuries from now.