Christmas in Emilia-Romagna - Art, architecture & gastronomy in Northern Italy

Bound by the River Po to the north and the Apennines to the south, this wedge of Italy is truly rich – prosperous, replete with alluring cities and great works of art, deeply and proudly gastronomic – and yet is still relatively neglected by cultural travellers. With many fewer visitors than Florence and Venice receive, one can view great architecture and world-class art works without as many dispiriting intrusions of a large-scale tourist industry, and particularly so at this time of year.

Across this undulating plain, one of the most fertile in Italy, the Romans founded a large number of prosperous towns and linked them by the Via Emilia which ran from Milan to the Adriatic coast. In the Middle Ages the region fragmented into a number of independent city states which, whether under a communal or despotic form of government, constructed mighty town halls, vast churches and splendid palaces, and caused great works of art to be created.

The tour is based in Bologna, one of Italy’s most engaging cities. The allure of aged red brick, great churches and memorial sculpture, magnificent palaces and civic buildings, first-rate galleries and frescoed halls and miles of arcaded streets are irresistible. It is home to Europe’s oldest university, is a beacon of good civic governance and has a world-wide reputation for gastronomic excellence.

Ferrara, Ravenna, Parma are among other cities of great wealth and fascination visited during the tour. Ferrara was the centre of the city-state ruled by the d’Este dynasty, whose court was one of the most lavish and cultured in Renaissance Italy. Once one of the most important cities in the western world and last capital of the Roman Empire in the West, Ravenna subsequently became capital of the Gothic kingdoms of Italy and of Byzantine Italy, and her Early Christian and Byzantine mosaics are the finest in the world. In Parma the often incompatible features of economic well-being and ancient, unspoilt and enchantingly picturesque streetscape are reconciled. The city was of great importance for its High Renaissance school of painting, in particular the astonishingly vital and illusionistic frescoes by Correggio in the cathedral.