Day Trip to Ferrara

Yesterday I took a trip to Ferrara for the day with three friends from Vassar, Nicole, Emily, and Giuliano. Ferrara is a city about a half hour away from Bologna, and I know it mostly from the book/movie The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani, on which I took a class last fall semester. There wasn't too much to see, but we got a nice taste of the city in the few hours that we were there.

Our first stop was Ferrara's medieval castle, Castello Estense, built in the 14th century. There we saw Eleanor of Aragon's Garden and Loggia of the Oranges, where she filled her terrace with orange trees...

...and we also saw the prison and dungeons where King Nicolo III imprisoned his son Ugo and his second wife Parisina, after he found out about their illicit affair, to await their beheadings. (But to be fair, both his son and his wife were twenty years old, so there wasn't an age gap. Poor kids.)

Then we climbed the tower and got to see Ferrara from the air, although it was nothing near the altitude we reached when we climbed the Duomo in Florence.

One of the Castle's courtyards

Giuliano, me, and Emily on the tower

We also saw Ferrara's Duomo, the city's main cathedral from the 12th century. This is the street next to the Duomo, showing the campanile constructed by Leon Battista Alberti:

The Duomo's façade - I was suprised to see a balcony

We also tried to go to the Synagogue and Jewish Museum, because Ferrara has a particularly sizable Jewish population (for Italy, that is). In fact, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is about a Jewish family in Ferrara in the years leading up to World War II. But unfortunately, despite what my guidebook said, both the synagogue and museum were closed in the afternoon.

Giuliano, Nicole, and Emily in front of the closed Jewish Museum. On the left is a plaque commemorating the Jews who were deported during World War II, and on the right is a plaque with Ferrarese Jews' names.

However, I would say the highlight of our day was lunch. We sought out a restaurant with a typical Ferrarese dish, cappellacci di zucca al burro e salvia, which is pasta stuffed with pumpkin and parmesan, topped with butter and sage. I love pumpkin in the fall, and it's so hard to find here! It was a fabulous dish. So fabulous that it warranted taking a picture:

Yum.

I also bought a typical Ferrarese cake, pampapato, which is chocolate cake with almonds, candied fruit, and a chocolate shell. It was invented by Corpus Domini nuns in Ferrara. I actually haven't tried it yet (it's wrapped...we'll see how long it stays that way) but it looks like it will be delicious.