At the end of June and on the first weeks of July Bologna becomes tinged of strong colours. It’s not hard, soon as you go a little far from the city center, to meet fields of poppies, wheat and also sunflowers. this really strikes me because in a few kilometers the scenery changes totally, from a metropolitan kind to a really different one. This is one of the thing I really like about Bologna, it’s way of transform itself and have so many different faces…
So if it happen to you to go by car along the roads of Casalecchio di Reno towards Sasso Marconi, at Trebbo di Reno or at Granarolo dell’Emilia you could get lost in a thousand golden smiles like those! In these pics I stopped along via Porrettana at Casalecchio di Reno… it will not be hard to see them because you will just see them from the main road. Just take the first street you see and then get lost into them like I did 🙂
To sunflowers it’s usually associated a happiness and light hearted meaning, but maybe not everybody knows that they are also symbols of a one-sided love and Clizia and Apollo legend explains us why! The story says that a nymph named Clizia deeply fell in love with Apollo, the sun’s god: everyday when he was getting accross the sky carrying on the sun, Clizia was watching him falling his moves with the head. At a point, Apollo noticed her and started seducing her, but soon he got annoied of his conquer and leaved her! Really heartbroken and disappointed, Clizia started crying in the middle of a field and din’t stop for 9 days, watching her beloved Apollo getting across the sky and ignoring her. She was so steady that her body transformed itself in a stem, thin but strong: her feet got into the earth and her hair became a golden shining corolla: Clizia became a sunflower.
Since then this flower, proud and strond, keep on loving with no prejudices and firmly its sun, even if he doesn’t care! I really prefer soooo much exchanged love affairs and full of smiles and happiness… but this mith it’s really fascinating and since I found it out I watch this beautiful flower with greater love 🙂
A curiosity to know: every 1st of May it’s celebrated the “International Sunflower Day”, founded by the Guerrilla Gardening association, which promotes “assault” gardening all over the world. It’s an event that since 2007 involves activist from all over the world! To partecipate to it you just have to plant that day some sunflower’s seeds in a sad and dismissed spot of your city. Next May I will make it for sure 😉
Don’t miss this amazing landscape and travel along those streets of Bologna where you will meet these yellow visions that will surely bring happiness in your days! And how beautiful this sceneries with our beloved San Luca’s hills back in this postcard <3
