Take a walk along a narrow street as it twists between tall buildings into the heart of Ferrara’s ancient Jewish ghetto and find the place which once served as the oldest synagogue in town. Push through the stubborn wooden doors into a proud old building which has survived quite a battering over the years. Notice the cracks where the 2012 earthquake shook almost all of the people living in the upstairs flats out as the structure was deemed to be at risk of collapse. Climb the old tiled staircase up a level to one of the only two flats still occupied, and inside the beautiful old bedsit you will find a party in full swing.

Musicians, managers, staff, family, friends and assorted hangers on from the Jazz Club Ferrara sitting around or busy arriving, each new entrant banging down bottles of wine on the big wooden table in the middle of the room, and everyone helping themselves filling little water glasses with red wine. A big pot of “pasta alla chitarra” boiling away on the stove, pizza in the oven, cool music on the stereo, plates, knives and forks circulating, a genial hubbub of conversation, “ciaos”, “belissimas” and ” “grazies.” Looking at the funky crowd all around, and then the food that’s appearing in the middle of the table, the applause and cheers that greets it, the pizza being pulled apart, the pasta dished up and distributed, Catherine turns to me and laughs “it’s like being in a Dolmio advert” … it’s true, although there aren’t many such adverts where you’d find joints being passed around with the dishes… 

Seeing what I’m thinking Tommy turns to me with a grin, “It doesn’t get any more Italian, huh?” Totti on the other side agrees “…yes, but this is special even for us … Ferrara is a special place for north Italy ” Totti is up from his home in Sicily on tour with the American jazz trio he manages, “The Bad Plus”, and is taking a break from his schedule to enjoy the party with the hosts of his group’s most recent concert. I think it’s high praise indeed for a Sicilian to pick out a north Italian place as somewhere special, but Ferrara it seems to me is that sort of a place.

I enjoyed a long chat with Tommy. He lived in New York for ten years and used to work there as a jazz drummer, earning big bucks playing every night on the top floor of the Rockefeller Centre, until 9/11 changed everything and the band were dismissed. He’s the first person I’ve ever spoken to who managed to convince me that there might be something in the conspiracy theories about US government involvement in 9/11, but then maybe it was just something in the air that night which influenced my mind. Certainly the analogy we managed to come up with between us about Al Qaeda being like an artist who sells multi-millions worldwide and storms the Grammys before going immediately to playing concerts in the back rooms of pubs made a lot more sense at the time than when I read back my notes about it the next morning….

I also told Tommy about our hitch-hiking project, from Iraq to Liverpool, and while I was doing so I felt for the first time a realisation of a fact that should have been staring me in the face for a long time – what we are doing is nuts. Sometimes it takes a change of perspective and of company to see the blindingly obvious. And what did it for me was noticing the look on Tommy’s face while I was telling him in a very matter of fact way about what we’d been up to and were planning. It was the same humouring look that you would give to a stranger at the bus stop if they told you, quite calmly and matter of factly, that they had just come from lunch with a Martian and were waiting for a unicorn to come along for them to ride home on. “Hitch-hiking from Iraq…” said Tommy, measuring each word carefully, “that is … so … interesting…”

And if at that time I had decided to just quit this hitch-hiking journey all together then I couldn’t have thought of a better place to abandon it than Ferrara. We originally came here just to see our friend Gigi and visit the Jazz Club. We planned to stay one night, tops two. In the end we stayed for four, and if it hadn’t have been for necessity driving us on elsewhere we would have lived there happily ever after.

The main reason we stayed so long was because of Gigi’s generous hospitality. He basically gave up his flat to us the whole time we were there, and it was a wonderful four day home. It was my kind of place, walls painted red, a little kitchen with a black teapot constantly boiling on the stove, bits and bobs from south-east Asian trips everywhere and loads of pieces of little works of art from friends covering the walls and shelves. The most interesting art story was about two Jackson Pollock-esque scrawls which came from the artist who used to live across the hallway in the old synagogue. The painter had given them to Gigi in return for two bowls of pasta, and now the pieces were valued at 800 euros each.

There were quite a few interesting tales to tell about that artist as it transpired. Gigi showed us the man’s old flat, and through the broken down door I could see an unbelievable clutter, as if the place was a ransacked crime scene, but apparently that was how the artist used to live there; the chaotic flat an outward expression of a chaotic mind. “A very psychopathic man, believe me” Gigi told me. How come the door was broken down I asked. “I broke his door…because he was breaking my balls every night for three months … so … but it’s ok…” replied Gigi with a shrug.

Now that the artist has gone the only remaining tenants in the condemned synagogue are Gigi and his Jazz Club Ferrara colleague Valentina, who rents the flat opposite which hosted the party I described at the start of this blog. Directly across the street from Gigi’s place lives Francesco, the club’s artistic director, and every morning he and Gigi open their windows and discuss the jazz club’s business across the street so narrow that they could almost pass each other cups of coffee.

Heading down to that street and then out and about we discovered that Ferrara is a very beautiful town in its own right, probably under-rated because of its proximity to such show-stopping stunners as Venice. Yes there are no canals there but the old town streets are otherwise the equal of anywhere else for atmosphere and the authentic preservation of the world of renaissance northern Italy. Wandering through them on a late afternoon listening to the sound of a string quartet, and dodging the occasional cyclist shooting down the lanes, I felt as if I’d strayed onto a movie set.

And tucked away in the backstreets are several fantastic spots. My favourite was “the oldest wine bar in the world”, dating from 1435, where Titian used to drink and Copernicus used to study in the upstairs room. Perhaps it was the head-spinning effect of all the wine here that gave him those crazy ideas about the earth rotating around the sun? On the way home from the ancient bar we picked up drinks at a modern shop, where top-draw local wines can be poured straight from the barrel into your bottle for two euros per litre

We took several litres back for the party that night. And every night seems to be some sort of party in Ferrara, whether high or low key. Always there are people gathering around Gigi and Valentina’s flats to share good wine, food, company, and music of course. Records I heard here for the first time included ones by Keith Jarrett, the Penguin Café Orchestra and Hank Mobley. My favourite was the incredible “Blues and Roots” album by Charles Mingus, and particular the track “Moanin’”, the main riff of which is still lodged in my head two weeks after I first heard it. “It’s like a mantra”, said Gigi, who learnt his English from a free book on Buddhism he picked up in south-east Asia.

Stefano, the bass player, had a different take on the track, “it’s like fuck you rock ‘n’ roll.” And, during a discussion about how jazz was the sound of an angry African-American community I did start to wonder whether that anger might explain some of the appeal to these young Italians. I’m not suggesting they’ve suffered anything like African-Americans, but having endured financial disaster and too many years of Berlusconi’s tragic clowning they do have lots to be angry about.

The music ringing around Ferrara is not all just on record of course. At the end of the party I described in the first couple of paragraphs I went back to the main room to say good night and found everybody silently engrossed in producing a symphony with their wineglasses. The noise being produced by the saxophonist Piero, with a combination of rubbing and blowing on the glass, sounded as if it was being transmitted from outer space.   

As I said in yesterday’s blog, I have to emphasise that this scene here, cool as it is, is also a warm one. All the people we met around the Ferrara are unpretentious and friendly. Sometimes in Britain, and elsewhere, people are so keen to be cool that they end up cold. It’s not the case here, as this next little story shows.

On our last night in Ferrara we went to the local bar near the synagogue and I interviewed Francesco for an article about the jazz club. He gave me a history of the music, how it had developed, spread to Europe post-war and the role it had played in “breaking down the walls between cultures.” When we all went to settle our bill after a few glasses of wine we discovered it had already been paid by a friend of Gigi’s we’d briefly chatted to earlier.

Ferrara is that sort of place, and over the course of four nights I fell for it. I love Italy, I love Ferrara, I love the jazz club, and one day I’ll come back to live here too…