Ferrara arrives quietly. The train from Venice pulls in, you walk out of the station and into streets that are wide and cobbled and almost entirely free of cars — and then you notice the bicycles. Dozens of them. Hundreds, eventually. Leaning against every bollard, moving through every junction, bells ringing at the cathedral square as if bells were invented specifically for this purpose. Ferrara has more bikes per person than almost anywhere in Italy. You feel it within ten minutes of arriving.
We had come for a night on the way south. We ended up grateful we hadn’t rushed it.
The Duomo di Ferrara, half in scaffolding, September sun at its fiercest. The half you can see is enough.
The castle in the middle of everything
Most cities keep their castles at the edge — somewhere defensible, somewhere removed. Ferrara put the Castello Estense right at the heart of things. It sits surrounded by a moat of genuinely green water, four towers at the corners, red-curtained windows watching the square below. You walk around it the way you’d walk around a lake. There is a small fountain in the moat that someone has thought to add, which feels like a very Italian touch — a medieval fortification, and also: a water feature.
We circled it more than once. From the bridge you look straight up at the clock tower and it fills the frame. From the far side, with the sun high and hard, the whole thing reflects in the water below it. We stood there longer than we planned to.
Castello Estense clock tower from the moat edge. The water does something interesting to the light.
The full castle from across the moat. Four towers, green water, September sun. The city grew around this.
The Buskers
We had not planned around a festival. Ferrara’s Buskers Festival — one of the largest street music events in Europe, it turns out — had filled the piazzas with performers and visitors and, more relevantly, with a 3D chalk artwork painted directly onto the stone of the main square: instruments spilling out of a painted hole in the ground, the castle rendered in trompe l’oeil at the centre, the word Buskers chalked in red at the bottom. People were walking around it and over it and photographing it from every angle.
We photographed it too. We are people.
The Buskers Festival chalk art, Piazza Trento e Trieste. Instruments and the castle in forced perspective, painted directly onto the square.
The diamond palace
The Palazzo dei Diamanti stops you. It earns its name — the entire exterior is faced with over eight thousand marble blocks cut into pyramid points, each one casting its own small shadow, the whole facade shimmering differently depending on where you stand and what the light is doing. It runs the length of a city block. The Italian and European flags hang from one corner.
We went around the side of it too, which you should — the corner is where the detail is sharpest, the stonework catching the afternoon at its best. A Fiat Punto was parked at a red light underneath it, which felt about right.
Palazzo dei Diamanti. Over eight thousand diamond-point marble blocks. The corner is where it makes most sense.
The entrance facade, afternoon light. Three people going in. The stonework does something different every hour.
Ferrara has lot of hidden little gems to find on foot. You would probably miss these on a bus/tour
Savonarola, Ariosto, and the squares they keep
Ferrara is a city of statues in squares — each one a different kind of famous, none of them letting you forget the city’s history. Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar born here in 1452 who eventually burned books in Florence and was then burned himself, stands with both arms raised in Piazza Savonarola as if still mid-sermon, pigeons settling on his outstretched hands. Lodovico Ariosto, the Renaissance poet, gets a tall decorated column in the Parco Massari — golden evening light catching the carved scenes winding up the shaft, children on the grass around the base.
Ferrara remembers its people. They get their own squares.
Savonarola in Piazza Savonarola. Arms raised. Five centuries and the pigeons don’t care.
The Ariosto column, Parco Massari. Golden hour. The park empties slowly.
The ghetto and the quiet streets
The old Jewish Ghetto sits to the east of the centre — narrow lanes where the brick closes in and the sky becomes a stripe above you. In one alley, an arch bridges the gap between buildings overhead and the cobbles below are rounded river stones, polished by centuries of feet. Nobody else was walking it when we were. The city was elsewhere.
This is the part of Ferrara the bicycles can’t reach. You have to go on foot.
Via delle Volte. The arch, the cobbles, the brick. The city within the city.
The pigeon mafia
We had a drink in the early evening at the café tables that set up beside the castle moat. Cold beer, the water just below us, the towers above. Ferrara at the end of a long warm afternoon.
The pigeons arrived almost immediately. Not one or two — a coordinated operation, moving between tables, assessing each one in turn, unimpressed by shooing. They had clearly identified this café as a reliable source of snacks and they were not leaving without a result. We surrendered a crisp. They seemed satisfied. Peace was maintained.
Sarah is photographed at this exact moment, looking up at something above the frame with an expression that could mean any number of things. Behind her, the green ironwork canopy of the café and the arch of the castle. The pigeons are just out of shot.
The café beside the castle. The pigeons arrived before the drinks did.
Patrizia’s
We stayed with Patrizia — a guest house whose name we mean to confirm and whose owner we mean to ask permission to mention properly. She was warm and direct in the way that Italian hospitality often is: not performative, not hovering, just genuinely pleased to have guests who were paying attention to her city. The room was comfortable. The morning was quiet.
It was the kind of place that makes you feel like a resident rather than a visitor, which is exactly the point.
We laced up for a run the next morning and left after a freshen up on the lunch time train south toward Ravenna. Ferrara behind us, the flat Emilian landscape sliding past the window, the city of bicycles already becoming a story we were telling each other rather than a place we were still inside.
It had given us a day and a half. That was enough to know we’d want to come back.
Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna — 4.24 miles (combined) — 1hr 48m — 44ft — 9,944 steps