A few hours in Bologna (Italy 2025 part 3)

Day 1 of the vacation itself wasn't all that exciting, mostly being a travel day to set up for the much bigger plans I had for the following two days. We'll start with the night I got to Bologna, and this bus that sure appears to have Comic Sans on its destination sign (something I saw a few times on buses of this model in Bologna). This is right outside the central station, which is where I had dinner that night (since I was too tired to wait until 7-7:30 when regular restaurants open); something was going very wrong with long-distance trains that afternoon and I spent a little while wandering around to check up on things and check out all of the interesting trains that were stuck parked in the station, before giving up on trying to stay awake and going to sleep around 7. 

My main goal of the morning was to find a trolleybus. No, not that kind. 

And not these shiny new battery buses either, though they are pretty cool. The internet had told me that of Bologna's 5-route trolleybus network, half of one route might have been operating (with others shut down due to construction or simply not running on weekends), but after a lot of searching around the area that route supposedly runs, I was unable to find any evidence of it existing at all, let alone operating with trolleybuses. I'll have to come back to Bologna on a weekday at some point, since I do have a goal of riding all of the trolleybus, tram, and metro systems in Italy eventually. (I'm nowhere near that goal right now, but I did pick up a few new systems on this trip.) 

One of Bologna's big tourist attractions is the pair of towers in the middle of the city. When I was here in the early 2010s, I climbed at least one (maybe both) of them, but unfortunately, the shorter one started collapsing a couple years ago, and now both are closed off until someone can figure out how to fix it.

There's plenty of other cool stuff in Bologna, including plenty of surviving medieval architecture that isn't about to fall down and some neat modern stuff, such as the glass entrance to an underground art museum in the foreground. 

The city is also famous for the porticoes lining most streets, which were helpful on this intermittently-rainy morning. They're currently working on building a new tram network, which is probably part of why the trolleybuses seem to be vaporware at the moment. 

I had been anticipating getting up very early on the first morning due to jetlag, but I never really had bad jetlag on this trip -- I guess my plan to wake up early and then sleep on the plane worked, even though I didn't get much sleep on the flight. That meant I only had a couple hours around Bologna before the train I wanted to catch to Milan, and I then spent way too much time looking for trolleybuses that didn't exist, meaning I almost missed my train. And then I got trapped by something that would come to be the bane of my existence on this trip: Apparently Trenitalia's app refuses to let you buy tickets if it thinks you aren't going to make the train, even if you're already sitting on it and just waiting for it to leave (the cutoff seems to be either 5 or 10 minutes, seemingly at random). There was no way I would have time to find a ticket machine and get back to the train before it left, so I was stuck buying a ticket for a different train on the same route, which the conductor didn't question when he came around to check tickets, thankfully. Trenitalia really has a knack for coming up with ways to annoy people who are trying to do the right thing and actually buy tickets... 

That first train took me as far as Milano Centrale, one of my favorite train stations anywhere (in part because it's one of the few in Italy to still have a full train shed instead of just little canopies on the platforms). Thankfully I had plenty of time for my connection (about 25 minutes), since it went to one of the platforms way out at the far end of the station! 

This wasn't my train, but I was excited to see one of the funky ETR.700s, which Breda built for the Dutch train system before dumping them on Trenitalia when they turned out to be total lemons. You have to admire Breda's consistency... 

I have a full tour of the areas outside the ticket gates coming up soon, so just a few pictures for now. This is a very impressive place, especially under the giant iron arches of the train hall. 

This is my train, on a platform where two of the big sections of arches come together. Normally this train would go all the way to Tirano, but on this weekend only (great timing on my part), it only went to Morbegno, where I would have to switch to a bus for the last hour of the trip. 

This train was a fairly boring Alstom Coradia/Jazz model, with the extremely uncomfortable seats that ever new train seems to have. At least it was pretty empty down at the far end of the train. 

The old signal cabinets on the way out of Milano Centrale are pretty neat too, especially with modern trains zipping under them! 

And here's the only picture I got of the bus for the last bit from Morbegno to Tirano. I was a bit frustrated about the train not running the whole way for just the day I wanted to take it, but luckily the bus turned out to be uneventful and we made it to Tirano pretty much on time. 

That's it for today, but there's some much more exciting stuff coming up starting tomorrow!