X.iv. The Hundred Steps

"Guercino was a great draftsman and a felicitous colourist."
- Ludovico Caracci

Cento, some forty kilometres north of Bologna, is almost solely known for being the birthplace of the Baroque painter, Guercino. In Italy, a painter gives his native town prestige almost to a greater degree than a poet or a pope. Of course, this might only be the result of aggressive tourism offices keen to promote a local who can make for a guided itinerary that passes by storefronts and restaurants. Either way, the stock of otherwise unremarkable villages and communes dot Italy like the freckles of a pretty girl's face.
    Cento is one such freckle. True, it is typical if not picturesque, and Goethe seems to have enjoyed his stay here on the way to Bologna, but aside from Guercino, Cento has very little to set it apart. I ventures here to see an exhibit of the painter's sanguine drawings, far more seductive to my tastes than his large, imposing finished works. Upon entering the town's little art gallery, I noticed a wall of posters, each celebrating an exhibition of Guercino's works held in the town. Clearly there had been many, the obvious work of a mad, persistent, or charming curator.
    Continuing northwards from Cento, I went to the yet smaller settlement of Bondeno. My photographer aunt Gabrielle, who had visited me in March, had some of her works featured in an exhibit entitled Seno Guerriero: Images of the Amazons, the myth of the armed woman from the XVII century up to the present day. The exhibit was interesting, and certainly quite different from the usual stops on my travels. Most of all it was astoundingly cosmopolitan, quite rarified for a town the size of Bondeno anywhere but in Italy, where such precociousness is to be expected.



The main square in Cento


My Aunt's photographs as the Seno Guerriero show in Bondeno