If it isn't too late you might want to add a day trip to the walled city of Ferrara (or an overnight stopover) to your summer itinerary. Less than half an hour north of Bologna on the line to Padua and Venice (all trains between Rome and Florence and Venice therefore pass through it), the intriguing and elegant medieval and renaissance city center with its magnificent Castle and Cathedral is only five minutes from the station by bus. From the Middle Ages till the end of the sixteenth century, the lords of Ferrara were the Este family. Like the other noble families of Italy, the second sons often went into the Church, and the Este produced a number of cardinals. The splendid Villa d'Este in Tivoli near Rome with its fantastic fountains was built by one of them, Ippolito d'Este. At the turn of the sixteenth century, between 1492 and 1510, Duke Ercole d'Este revolutionized the city's layout hiring architect Biagio Rossetti to design the broad and elegant streets lined with sumptuous palaces (the unmissable Palazzo dei Diamanti modern art museum is one of them) of the so-called Addizione Erculea. The family were great patrons of art and letters, and yesterday, July 4, an important exhibit, Cosmè Tura and Francesco Del Cossa, l'arte a Ferrara nell'età di Borso d'Este was inaugurated by Francesco Rutelli, Minister of Culture, in the Church of Santa Marta. (Controversial Vittorio Sgarbi, an art historian and TV personality from Ferrara who served in the former Berlusconi government, was conspicuous by his absence.) In October 2007, by the way, the gallery of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg is planning to open an Italian exhibition space in Ferrara. Cossa and Tura collaborated with Ercole de' Roberti and a team of Ferrarese painters (including Baldassare, a bastard son of Duke Borso) to complete the cycle of frescos in the Salone dei mesi at the summer palace of Schifanoia (it means something along the lines of "Begone, Dull Care") in an whirlwind two-year campaign (1469-70). For centuries, these and other Quattrocento Ferrarese masters took a back seat to the Florentine hegemonists pushed by Mannerist painter Giorgio Vasari until University of Bologna art historian Roberto Longhi rediscovered them in his Officina ferrarese (1934). The frescos at Schifanoia inspired some of Ezra Pound's Cantos. If Ezra was an antisemite (despite his biblical name), the Este family were not, and in 1492 they invited the Jews exiled from Spain to settle in Ferrara. Ferrara still had a thriving Jewish community in the 1930s, when Giorgio Bassani (a novelist from Ferrara we recently met in Acquerello italiano) wrote about the plight of Ferrara's for the most part "assimilated" Jews, capturing their consternation when their Fascist neighbors decided after nearly 500 years that they were after all different and shipped them off to Auschwitz. Some of the greatest names in renaissance Italian literature--Matteo Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, authors of delightfully long narrative poems (you don't want them to end) celebrating the feats and follies of the knightly hero Orlando (Roland), as well as the hapless Torquato Tasso, author of an epic poem on the First Crusade, Jerusalem Delivered, that influenced John Milton--are associated with Ferrara. Tasso, born in Sorrento, actually went crazy there and you can visit the cell where they locked him up. Ferrara has a place in the history of Italian cinema too. Luchino Visconti, just back from France, where he served as assistant to director Jean Renoir, the son of the painter, set his magnificent Ossessione (1942), his take on James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (and far and away the best film version), in the countryside outside Ferrara. It is the provincial capital where the protagonists Clara Calamai and Massimo Girotti buy the insurance on her husband. Another of Ferrara's native sons is Michelangelo Antonioni (who has his own museum), the poet of late 20th-century alienation (L'avventura 1959, La notte, 1961, L'eclisse 1964, Blow Up 1966) and exquisite industrial decay (Deserto rosso 1964). Not far from Ferrara is the Po Delta and the Adriatic beaches of the Lidi ferraresi and the Lido di Spina, a Greco-Etruscan port dating back at least the fifth century B.C. (if not to the descendants of the Argonauts), which, legend has it, witnessed the fall of Phaethon who mishandled the chariot of the Sun and Icarus who flew too close to it and melted his waxen wings. Hot stuff!