The long porticos—the columned, roofed walkways of Bologna’s city centre—make it feel immediately welcoming, shielding you from both the threat of rain or too much sun. Each walk around this city feels as grand as it is easy. Bologna is a university town so it has a youthful energy, yet the surrounding walls make it feel intimate, and defined. It’s a fairly small city but its maziness and detail make it feel exciting and warren-like, especially if you’re new to the place, or have been on the birra.

It’s a place to just cruise about, get a bit confused in, and fall in love with. It’s all the clichés of being in Italy: beautiful food and drink, top people, obvious political engagement. The dream bar, Lortica, on via Mascarella, offers top beer and a decent measure of anti-fascism. It’s a place where everyone is welcome and they won’t give you trouble if you’re smoking hash outside. Maybe a big fucking blunt would be too far, but it’s worth checking. Still, we can smoke in the street with our cans and light feet.

I always meet Francesco Gaballo, Franco, at Lortica for our first pint of the ordeal because it’s the best place to drink in Bologna. It has birra alla pompa (cask ale) and good crisps. I first met Franco when he was working at Redchurch Brewery (RIP) many years ago when he moved to London as a young man looking to get his first proper job in beer. It worked out, and Franco was in London for five years with stints at Redchurch, Brew by Numbers and FourPure (plus a short turn at Brixton Brewery) but now is back home in Italy.

Franco is a Venice native and studied his masters degree in chemistry at the Università Ca’Foscari in the city, going on to study to be a birrio—a brewer—at the Università Di Scienze Gastronomiche in Pollenzo, founded by the Slow Food organisation. His first brewing work came with an apprenticeship with Walter Lover at LoverBeer, a brewery near Turin specialising in wild and spontaneously fermented beer.

“[Walter] was very particular, he makes beers inspired by ‘lost’ types of beer, so the guy is very nerdy, in a positive way,” Franco tells me. “He’s very knowledgeable about the history of beer producers, but he was very protective of his creations, he didn’t want to show me all of his recipes, which is fair!”

I’ve often wondered if Franco was interested in taking that experience into his new brewery, Bologna’s Birrificio Emiliano, given the beers he’s made so far are all about brewing to style. These include Fuoco Fatuo, a sensationally refreshing pils lightened with rice flakes, a perfectly balanced brown called Spelt C’est Toi made with farro, and the inhalable IPA, Amore Amaro, weighing in at a dangerous 5.7%.

Franco just shrugs as I heap praise upon him, “I just want to brew clean, drinkable, understandable beer,” he says. “At home I’ve also started making tepache as a hobby (a Mexican fermented beverage made from the rind of pineapples). I also want to start experimenting with ginger beer… in the future I think I’m going to try to blend the tepache to make a sour beer.”

I know Franco loves to ferment, I saw the tepache in his kitchen, covered by a rubber glove that seemed to be trying to get my attention. He worked for a while at the city’s finest proponents of pane di pasta madre (sourdough) Forno Brisa and now knocks out bread for fun.

““I just want to brew clean, drinkable, understandable beer.””

— Francesco Gaballo, Birrificio Emiliano

“I was studying, but [working at LoverBeer] was my first experience in a commercial brewery,” Franco says. “I wish it came later in my brewing experiences because the guy was doing very niche type of products [including] spontaneously fermenting wild beers.”

“I didn’t even know the process very well to understand what was going on… I could’ve learned more if it came later on.”

Now, with five years of London beer education behind him, Franco is head brewer at Birrificio Emiliano, a brewery reborn after previously being torpedoed by poor management. Having ceased trading for six months from 2019, Franco’s first brew in mid-August that year reignited the brewery, and a lot of solo brewing during the pandemic allowed him to perfect his recipes.

“I don’t brew beers that I don’t like to drink,” he says. “I had a beer, a kind of golden wheat ale, a Belgian type of beer that I’ve been brewing for two years and recently I decided, no, it’s shit and I got rid of it…”

“I enjoy brewing dark beers and lager,” he adds. “Dark beers because you get to play a lot with the different malts to make it more complex. And lagers you have to be so precise, you can’t hide behind dry-hopping etc.”

New to the Bologna bar scene is a taproom from Birrificio Emiliano, just a few minutes walk from Lortica. It was wonderful to see Franco in the finished bar, as on my last visit he was showing me around a wreck of a room, gesturing at where the taps will be, beaming with pride at the plans, but puffing out his cheeks in exasperation when pointing to the mosaic floor that had to be scraped of old tiles and glue. Where once the phrase ‘Motherfucker’ had been spray-painted on the wall, (which I think should have been kept as a feature,) there’s now a neon saying Bel Gusto—‘good taste.’

And good taste is what Bologna is all about. The food here is the thing that keeps visitors coming back, but the beer scene is in good shape. Despite being a big tourist destination, however, it’s difficult to get ripped off, because the quality is high thanks to the notorious Italian pride in produce. The market street, Via Pescherie Vecchie, is the perfect place to get amongst the snacks, particularly at Salumeria Simoni Laboratario where the silky sheets of mortadella, crumbling chunks of parmesan and the fucking re-fried porchetta, which should delight anyone with a functional mouth.

You’re also in a good place around here to check out tourist hotspot Le Due Torri, The Two Towers, both of which are leaning. In fact, at the time of my latest visit they were leaning a bit too much and had to be fenced off. If I’d been standing in Bologna for nearly a thousand years I’d be sagging too, given the aforementioned relaxed attitude to public weed smoking and the fine booze to be found at every turn.

Of course, you’re probably here for the spag bol, cazzo. But they don’t have their meat sauce with spaghetti, they have it with flattened spaghetti. You’re after tagliatelle al ragu and if Franco is your guide and he knows that fine beer is also important, you end up at Ragu and Draft on Piazza Aldrovandi, one of a series of permanent market huts lining the roadside that serves up food as good as any restaurant. Having fine pasta out of a takeaway box is unusual, but so is getting top food and top beer together, so it’s all ideal; such is the texture of these Bolognese streets.

““In the park the gelato hut is firing out birra, various people have gathered and music is lunging around, semi-rhythmicly.””

Bologna has that feeling of a fun city, with things breaking out all over the place, allowing you to blast through scene after scene, cutting ribbons across the town. At the Emiliano taproom they capture the energy of the city completely. There’s live music, art exhibitions, DJ sets, and even darts tournaments. When I drop in to see Lorenzo Gualandi, the man running the show at the bar, it’s unusually quiet, and we reflect on the reality of running a bar. As I know from running my own place, Reddish Ale, in Stockport, it’s really fucking difficult.

Lorenzo is an easy man to talk to, if you’re not a total bastard. He’s got good opinions in all the right places and we’re quick to start shitting on the demented cock of the neoliberal order and the madness of the mass-murdering capitalists. Conversation turns to our other common ground—the fact we’ve both been running a bar that’s in its early stages over the last year. We sit outside the empty bar, having a beer and a joint, attempting to shrug off the unknowable nature of bar traffic. It’s impossible to know what these people want. And when they do want something they’re dicks about it. Inevitably the bar suddenly starts to fill up and everything’s ok again, we can tear up the suicide pact.

I was smashing my way through glassfuls of Amore Amaro, which Franco tells me is, “close to a West Coast IPA but not as dry—a chubby West Coast IPA.” We both agree that Sorso Bruno, his porter, also has something special about it. I first tasted the porter on tap at the old Birrifcio Emiliano taproom, located on an industrial estate roughly 10 miles outside of Bologna city centre and I gave it the highest praise I could—it reminded me of Railway Porter from Hackney’s The Five Points, in my opinion one of the most perfect beers available.

The bar is on a perfect corner plot under a portico, around the corner from via Mascarella with plenty of outside seating for the smoking, shouting crowd. The hidden gem of Mascarella, however, is the record shop, Sonic Belligeranza Megastore. Run by Riccardo Balli aka DJ Balli—a former philosophy student in Bologna—the place used to be essentially a record shop in a doorway but has moved just across the road to a place that has more room for browsing.

Riccardo is a top guy and is considered to be a legend in his scene, with his label releasing music that has been described as “wildly experimental, conceptual and often controversial.” I picked up a bumper single from an artist called Prostitutes, and Riccardo let us know there was going to be a party in the local park, Parco Della Montagnola. A stage was set next to a gelato place and there was going to be tunes from 9. After a few pints at Lortica and Emiliano we’re then sloping into it, the full Bologna experience; a taste of Berlin in Italy.

In the park the gelato hut is firing out birra, various people have gathered and music is lunging around, semi-rhythmicly. Seasoned dancers move to the gabber, impervious to the frenetic BPM, whilst I had no idea what I was listening to, but I appreciated the spirit. I felt like a student of the city being exposed to new information as it blasted in, swirling with the fog of bud smoke and cloudy beer. Bologna has what it takes to get you excited, educated, experienced, nourished and absolutely mashed.

Bologna is also an easy place to wake up crying and screaming, unsure of how it ended, how deep we twisted it; why were we shouting so much? Is that sign that’s appeared overnight aimed at us? Will we ever be able to get an Air BnB ever again? The city will always be delicious, even the late night shawarma is the best you could hope for—bless you Beirut Snack for the things you’ve achieved.

Fortunately, Italy is the perfect place to be hungover, as breakfast bars serve lager and lager smoothes all ills, and coffee, I suppose, if you’re a coward. Pizza pastries, little sandwiches, dolce for sugar bumps. Fix me, please, so I can get back to the lageria.