October 4, 2024–. Bobbio! Because now we are getting close to my ancestral surroundings, and because our stay in the area will be relatively short to fit everything in, I am going to keep these next few blog posts pretty brief. Today, it was a cloudy-just-a-little-sun-type of day—but, unlike yesterday, it was not raining. After a lovely breakfast at our Farmhouse B&B, we went to town to visit the Santuario Basilica Madonna dell’Aiuto (Madonna of Help); tasted Gnocco Fratto with cheeses in a piazza little restaurant; visited in Duomo di Bobbio, also dedicated to Mary and the Annunciation; visited the small mountaintop nearby town oof Brugnello; visited the Basilica of San Colombanus, and ended the day with an exquisite home-cooked several-plate dinner by our hosts at our B&B.
Breakfast was composed of toasted bread slices with two kinds of fruit home-made jam and home-made butter sourced by cows on the opposite hill (I thought the butter was cheese and ate a chunk—I soon learned that I had made an error, and was a little bit grossed out; however, it actually tasted pretty good for being butter! Additionally, there were fresh fruits on the table, fresh squeezed orange juice, little home-made cookies, snack-size pieces of three or four homemade pastries, and the best fresh fruits-topped yogurt and homemade granola! There were also almonds,fresh blueberry-tasting blueberries, prunes, and dried apricots on a small tray. Our host made the best coffee for me: Hot milk with just a splash of coffee, topped with cappuccino froth! Very, very good!!
The Madonna dell’Aiuto features a fresco-type shrine to Mary and Baby Jesus, painted on a wall of the Church.. The special thing about this image is thatt around the 1400s, the image of Mary began to perspire. To protect the image from moisture, a cloth of some kind was placed in front of the image, thereby covering the image up. Miraculously, the entire image of Mary transferred onto the cloth! No one knows what happened to that Holy Cloth since this occurrence. Pilgrimages used to come to view and venerate Mary through this image from all around.
The Gnocco Fratto intrigued me because images of it looked as if the Gnocco were just fried puffy bread rather than anything to do with gnocchi. Yup! I was correct! It is fried dough, but it is a very thin pastry. The shape was a small rectangle about 3 x 2 inches.It was good, it was not gnocchi. Also, I am not a fan of fresh Gorgonzola cheese….The other kinds were delicious.
The Duomo di Bobbio is actually a Cathedral! The inside of the Cathedral is Gorgous! The many, many frescos and the beautiful blue of the ceilings were spectacular!
Our hosts recommended that we go to Brugnello because of the exquisite scenery! More speciffically, the Trebbia River, which snakes around the Bobbio area, creates a horseshoe shape as it winds about in gravelly, rocky, mountainous terrain. It was reminiscent to me of the Colorado River in Page, AZ, a spot called Horseshoe Bend! Whereas when I viewed Horseshoe Bend the water was a deep olive green, this Trebbia River water was a light blue/white/ice-colored waterway, especially as it raced around the rocks and graced the shoes of light-colored gravelly terrain. Just.beautiful! AND…the town of Brugnelllo itself is gorgeous! It looks as if one has stepped into a fable! The flowers against the dark cobble-stone are beautiful, and even the cobblestone walkways are formed into mosaic-like floral designs. In fact, as we drove the squirrelly curly-queue mountainside to get to Brugnello, there were metal whimsical artistic structures planted into the rocky mountainside. Our host explained that all of this was done by a man named Pinpin Mazzotti, who lived in Brugnello, had retired, and did all of this artwork as a hobby.
San Colombano was an Irish monk in the 600s who is said to have founded Bobbio. The town of Bobbio is derived from the Celtic word Boi. He is buried in the basilica of the monastery that he “built”, and one can view his crypt inside the Church. He is the person who also made that bargain with the Devil that resulted in the Devil building the Ponte del Diavolo in town. Near the crust of San Colombano are other crypts. If one looks very, very carefully, one can see intricate hand-made mosaic floor in the crypt areas over which the new Church was erected.
The beautiful day closed with an exquisite homemade multi-plate meal, complemented with three kinds of homemade wines from the hosts’ vineyard. The meal was served in a large cozy common room of the B&B that used to be the barn 200 years ago when the host’s grandparents owned the farm. The host’s criteria were three: The food had to be locally sourced or their farm yields; it had to be 100% free from chemicals and preservatives—it had to be all “natural”; and the recipes had to be regionally authentic as of pre-WW II (when the host’s grandmother was still alive. We were billed extra for this meal, but it was well worth it and not out of the range of a much simpler meal
TTFN! (Tah-ttah-for-now 🙂
Our Travels 