“Beautiful and sweet Bologna! I spent perhaps the most beautiful seven years there”. With these words, Italian film director, writer and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini describes his love for the city of his birth. A city of art, culture and counterculture, a city of undeniable gastronomic wealth and enjoyment, but only the less discerning eye would file it away as merely the home of tortelli and tagliatelle.
A very personal attachment by the greatest Italian intellectual of the post-war period that would lead him to shoot some scenes from his last, controversial masterpiece “Salò e le 120 giornate di Sodoma” (Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom) in the Bolognese hills, inside Villa Aldini, which dominates the city and which Napoleon declared “superbe!” You can’t go inside the villa, but it’s still worth admiring its neoclassical elegance from afar.