Ferrara was Sarah’s idea, and she was right.
We’d jumped on the train down from our night in Venice and had a night here first. So we woke on a warm September morning — one of those early autumn days where the light is still summer but the trees have started making plans. Ferrara is less than an hour from where we’re going to live, which means we needed to understand it. So we laced up.
The walls
The walls were the obvious place to start. Ferrara’s Renaissance ramparts are among the best preserved in Europe — nine kilometres of them, circling the city in an almost perfect loop, planted with trees and given over entirely to people on foot and on bikes. No cars. No fumes. Just gravel underfoot and canopy overhead and the city sitting quietly below you on either side.
We joined the circuit at the eastern end and headed north, the September sun still low enough to throw long shadows across the path. The trees — plane, poplar and lime mixed in together — form a continuous tunnel of green that in a few weeks would be gold. We were catching the last of summer.
The main tree-lined path along the ramparts. Morning shadows long across the gravel. The city held back on both sides.
The outer section of the circuit: the wall dropping away to the left, the embankment rising to the right, poplars standing vertical against the blue.
The outer edge
The outer sections are different in character to the town-facing paths. Out here the wall falls sheer to the old moat, now mostly grass, and beyond it: open farmland, flat as a table, running out to the horizon. Northern Italy does this — turns a corner and the Alps disappear and it’s just plain and sky as far as you can see. The gravel path follows the ridge exactly, trees on the embankment above you, the medieval brick dropping away below.
The far outer stretch where the city falls away entirely. Two lines of trees, the path between them, fields opening out to the right.
On this section Sarah was running too, though she had her phone out. I took her picture without her noticing, which is the best kind. She was checking something — her pace, probably, or a message, or the name of the tree species she’d been staring at for ten minutes. It didn’t matter. The walls were doing the work.
Sarah mid-stride on the rampart path, checking her phone, entirely absorbed. Two shadows on the gravel: hers and mine.
Looking out
At the northern stretch the wall reaches a section where you can see back over the moat and out across the landscape — a watchtower in the middle distance, an old iron bridge, the road below carrying ordinary Thursday-morning traffic. From up here the transition between medieval and contemporary is completely matter-of-fact. The fortification is just part of the commute now.
Top of the wall looking north: the watchtower, the iron bridge, the green slope dropping to the moat. Sarah visible at the edge of frame, still photographing.
Into autumn
By the time we reached the eastern section the light had shifted and the trees on the outer bank had started to turn. Not committed to it yet — just the first yellows creeping in at the edges, the brick wall below them catching the warmth. It won’t be long before this whole circuit is gold and copper and the locals run it in their hundreds. We were here just before that.
The grassy bank and ancient brick wall with the first autumn colour breaking in the trees. The wall still warm, the season just starting to move.
Underground
Halfway round, tucked into the outer wall, we found the ruins of an old bastion. A vaulted brick arch opening into darkness. Grass growing through the floor. A yellow information sign that neither of us stopped long enough to read. Some things are better glimpsed than explained.
The vaulted arch of the bastion ruins, brick above and grass below, the darkness through the opening complete. The sign unread.
The city below
At one point — coming off the wall and back into the streets — we stopped on the bridge parapet and looked back down into Ferrara. A wide tree-lined avenue, cyclists at the junction, a bar with yellow umbrellas already open. The city going about its morning. From up here you’d never guess the ramparts were right behind you. Ferrara keeps its extraordinary things very quietly.
View from the bridge back into the city. The bar with yellow umbrellas, the junction, the avenue running straight between its trees. Normal Thursday morning.
We didn’t complete the full loop. The circuit is nine kilometres and we cut across the city centre at roughly the halfway point, dropping down off the walls and back through the streets toward the hotel. Next time I’ll do the whole thing.
I already know I’m coming back. Ferrara is forty minutes from Ravenna, the trees will be gold in another month, and the walls will still be there.
It will become a regular run. That much is already settled.