This week's newsletter comes to you from aboard the Frecciarossa 1000 high-speed train to Napoli. Its bright red bodywork cuts a bold figure on platforms across the country. Sleeker and more aerodynamic than Italy's older rolling stock, the train takes its cues from the Japanese Shinkansen. It is a connection made tangible by Hitachi logos hidden around the interior, a discrete marker of the train's manufacturer. Once in motion, it cruises at a cool 300 km/h, well below its designed top speed of 400 km/h.
We're taking a pause from our usual Tokyo-centric programming this week. As the Italian countryside glides past, it feels good to be back here. This particular Frecciarossa departed Milan and will call at Rome, though I won't have time to explore either on this trip. Having come up from Florence, I boarded in Bologna and will ride straight through to the final stop, Napoli Centrale. With three hours ahead, there's just enough time to share a pair of impressions from my journey thus far.
Open Espresso
The coffee bar in Florence Airport's entry hall was alive with activity. Airport staff, police officers, and returning business travellers leaned against the counter as a spirited barista pulled shot after shot of espresso, keeping up a lively conversation with each guest.
Italy stirs mixed feelings in coffee aficionados. The otaku in me—the type who weighs beans and measures yield to a tenth of a gram—does not find a home here. The best espresso rarely comes from the design-forward speciality cafés you might expect in Tokyo or London. More often, it's served by a workaday barista, like the one at Florence Airport, whose casual mastery of bean and machine is born of thousands of shots pulled by instinct, not metric.
Atmosphere, too, plays a significant role in the making of the perfect espresso. For the regulars at the airport coffee counter, there's nothing perfect or imperfect about it—it's simply a coffee break between work. For me, though, the enamoured outsider, this chaotic, shoulder-to-shoulder ritual is energising. It stirs a sense of anticipation, setting the tone for what lies ahead in the city.
It is my first time in Florence. I wouldn't usually head straight for the centre in Tokyo—but that's because I know it well and can afford to take the long way around. In an unfamiliar city, with just a couple of days to get my bearings, I finish my espresso and focaccia, board a taxi, and go directly to the heart of it all.
Florence's urban geography centres on the Arno River, which bisects the city and frames the historic core like a spine. The medieval and Renaissance centre—dense, walkable, and defined by narrow streets and grand civic architecture—is clustered primarily on the north bank. The main arterial roads, such as Viale Francesco Redi and Viale Belfiore, arc around this core in a rough semicircle, acting as a boundary between the centro storico and the more modern districts.
From the outer edges of the city centre, graffiti-tagged apartment blocks and fractured pavements gradually yield to neighbourhoods of increasing polish and conscious preservation. Stone palazzi emerge, cobbled streets assert their presence, and my driver's skill is striking: tight turns around ancient pillars and brisk manoeuvres through dense tourist crowds. He makes excellent time—this driving style borders on a modern urban art form.
Our route winds through back streets that follow the river before coming to a stop in a narrow alley opening onto the north bank of the Arno. I step from the car and take in the view. It features the Ponte Vecchio, the only Florentine bridge to survive the Second World War intact. A sense of condensed history settles in—centuries of wealth and power have coalesced along this riverside, now on display for the world.
Upon entering a city, the first touch points often become the most enduring in memory: a first taste of local rhythm, an adjustment to the air and pace, those early impressions formed during the transition from transport hub to city centre. As it stands, I don't think anyone has surpassed the airport barista's espresso yet. But perhaps he had an edge. Arrival carries a particular openness, a sensory receptiveness that's hard to sustain.
Rust and Rose
Looking out of my hotel window for the first time onto a small piazza, I was struck by a sense of warmth, though the temperature was no higher than in Florence. It was a perceived warmth, not meteorological but aesthetic. Bologna greets you in this way with a heat baked into its walls, ambient and enduring.
While Florence's centro storico is built in ivory and pale lemon, with façades of pietra serena and canary yellow stucco, Bologna shifts the palette several tones deeper. Here, buildings wear terracotta, burnt orange, ochre, and umber in layered variation. A coral-hued apartment might neighbour a sienna-toned university building, joined by an arcade in dusty persimmon. Even the shadows are tinged with red.
The city's colour palette originates from its ancient bricks, which were made from local clay rich in iron. When fired, the iron oxidised, producing deep hues ranging from reddish-orange to reddish-brown. These durable bricks were used structurally and as a surface finish over centuries, retaining their characteristic warmth. Terracotta, baked earth in the truest sense, was plentiful, inexpensive, and remarkably resilient.
While wealthier cities like Florence and Venice fancied imported marble and pale stone to signal grandeur, Bologna made do with what it had—earthy, pragmatic materials that, through consistent use, shaped a visual language in tune with the city's grounded nature. Along the porticoes, students drift, conversing in pairs, as elderly residents wheel shopping trolleys or rest beneath ceiling fans in cafés. Tourists filter through the lanes, undeniably audible and visible but not wholly displacing the city's easygoing rhythms.
Bologna's dominant tones were first established by its bricks and fired clay, but over time, stucco became widely used, often finished with washes tinted by natural earth pigments. Today, buildings are repainted in alignment with this heritage palette. Like many Italian cities with significant historical centres, Bologna enforces a Piano del Colore ("Colour Plan" ), an urban policy that regulates façade colours within protected zones.
Some critics suggest the city should prioritise more pressing issues. Yet, there remains a sense of civic pride in preserving "La Rossa", Bologna's long-standing nickname, drawn directly from the colours of its built environment. When buildings are renovated or restored, the requirement is to return them to a state that maintains their original visual harmony. The process often involves detailed historical research: analysing old paint layers, consulting archival records, and studying the native tones of underlying materials.
The spirit of La Rossa runs through Bologna's twenty-five miles of covered arcades, an architectural nervous system spanning the city. Like the foot traffic they shelter, these porticoes carry the city's colour palette forward. Light filters in sideways beneath them, scattering gold and orange tones and casting elongated shadows across patterned tiles. Columns of stone or brick—some smooth, others flaking—support ceilings that range from exposed wooden beams to faded frescoes.
If I were to locate Bologna within my Japan-centric frame of reference, I'd pair it with Nagasaki and its arcades: unhurried, tinged with red, and dressed in the decorative remnants of another time. No two stretches are quite alike, but all share the same chromatic register of rust and rose.
After days of overcast skies and intermittent rain across central Italy, Friday evening brought a golden hour of remarkable clarity. Even neutral surfaces can catch fire in such light, so the effect is transformative in La Rossa. The ruddy light deepens, turning redder still. Every façade seems to tilt toward the same pigment as if the city were composed of a continuous material. Shadows take on a velvety richness. Stray beams that reach the alleyways glow softly. And the city seems to simply drink it in.
Until we meet back in Tokyo,
AJ