Stillness drapes over Modena. When compared to Bologna, it is an unsettlingly quiet place. When walking the streets it is not obviously smaller or less urban than its big brother city, but you can get lost for half an hour or so in which time you won’t walk past anything.

After one of these half hours – the first after the train station – we drifted past a military academy palazzo on a sun-draped piazza. Perfect coffee weather, we said, though cruelly, when we sat outside an ornate bar, a shadow fell and divided the street longways, cloaking us in its chill.

Many of Bologna’s familiar scenes are here too. You can spend half an hour orbiting the piazze on narrow yard-like streets that look just like Via delle Tovaglie or its neighbours in the South of Bologna’s old town. These are murky, musky places where you rarely pass another soul. Narrow lanes with high buildings casting their shade from either side. The walls are yellow with a visible baked ceramic quality. The porticos are often cracked, misaligned, and mismatched, and if you stare down one, they are rarely straight, but usually slink off round an accidental bend. fitting Their floors are sometimes pretty mosaics or patterned tile, but equally often are made of patches of grey concrete slapped-down in a hurry. The frontages of the buildings, hooded in the porticos’ shade, are autumnal-coloured stucco, but the walls are uneven and wonky, taking on the quality of sand dunes whittled and smoothed by wind. These lanes often smell gently of sewage or municipal bins. You are truly alone on these streets, and they invite you to walk slowly, past the signs of nearby human life; the odd parked car or populated washing line are like museum artefacts, only suggesting the presence of life.

We rounded one of these eternal bends for some time, aware that the street was taking us only around where we wanted to go. The sun was out and the sky was a clear and solid blue for the first time since arriving in Italy three weeks earlier. Now was the time for the outdoor seating culture to come into its own. Now was the time for us to finally enjoy an outdoor drink without being swaddled in coats. Now was the time to feel a cool breeze on our faces and savour the mild smells that drift on the air on such bright and temperate days. But where was the sun? The clear blue sky indicated its presence and the walk to Bologna Centrale on the way had been warm and summery. Now, though, the bright clarity of the sky was literally a false dawn, as we shivered through dark porticoes on an endless orbital road. The piazza and the broad boulevards were somewhere to our right the whole time but we circled them helplessly, unable to find a perpendicular street to turn down.

And so, we stood in penumbral spaces for much of the day, and Modena was a story of the sharp edge between shadow and light. We took cold salumi and tortellini in brodo for lunch, itself an instructive contrast of a pair. The cold meats were unsatisfying on this day when I needed a warming and hearty meal. The brodo provided this, but became an emblem for some misconceptions about this part of the country. The food, on the whole, is brothy and hearty, its spirit asking to be served on a tavern’s hearth to sheltering guests. The occluded spaces of the porticoes cast walkers in shade, and the wind through the Po Valley keeps the coats on you longer into the year than you would imagine. This is not sunshine, tomatoes, and basil Italy, but something much more Teutonic. In Modena, our search for the sunlight accompanied this realisation, as the pure blue of the sky could not have been further from the dim of the pavements.

In Modena’s Piazza Grande, the sun finally comes out and warms you. A full sense of timelessness and still now descends as you look at the Duomo’s leaning towers and occluded exterior balconies. You notice the number of people standing still, a sign that there is enough in the place, environmentally and ambiently speaking, that simply standing and diffusing yourself into the atmosphere is enough, and no extraneous ‘activities’ or cumbersome ‘tasks’ are needed.