Evaporite karst and caves of Emilia Romagna Region: Messinian Gypsum of Bologna

It was rather difficult to grasp the OUV of this nomination, so I thought there was no better way to recognize it than taking a tour of one of the caves.

The Spipola Cave is one of the two main caves in the core zone of this section of the TWHS.  After my two failed attempts to take the tour in June and September 2022, I finally managed to take it in the Sunday morning on May 28, 2023. It was the last day of my 18 days trip through the UK, France and Italy, and indeed I had a flight from Bologna back to Wroclaw, Poland, in that afternoon.

Here is more about how I made the reservation:

I started thinking about incorporating this tour into my trip itinerary only after I purchased the ticket for the flight out of Bologna. So I knew that I had only Sunday morning for the tour, and very fortunately the tour was offered only on Sunday mornings. In fact the tour to the Spipola Cave and the tour to the Farneto Cave were offered alternately on almost every weekend morning over the summer.

http://www.parks.it/parco.gessi.bolognesi/man_dettaglio.php?id=104212

https://enteparchi.bo.it/escursione-speleologica-nella-grotta-della-spipola/

When I sent an email to make a reservation, the first thing they said in the reply mail was "Let us see if we can find an English speaking tour guide for that Sunday morning." Within a few days I received another email stating that they found one, so they went ahead and booked a place for me in the tour. I received yet another email from the English speaking guide himself. He warned me that participants would get wet and dirty, in the darknes of the cave, so he recommended that I bring another set of clothes to change into after the tour. I anticipated a rather difficult, speleological tour. I was never asked to pay for this tour, so I never paid. 

Only several days before this tour on May 28, 2023, the massive rain and flood in the region that covers this TWHS hit the international headlines. So a few days before the tour I emailed the English-speaking guide to ask if our tour would go ahead. He replied and said yes, but informed me that he was no longer the tour guide on my tour...

Now about my experience at the TWHS:

The Farneto Cave

Having arrived from the Montecatini Terme WHS by train in the mid-afternoon of the Saturday before the Sunday tour, I decided to visit the other cave of the two: the Farneto Cave in that Saturday afternoon.  Although I was aware that the cave was also entered with a guide only and the visitor center there was closed on weekends, I knew that there were some info boards along the path from the visitor center to the cave.

I was only using Google Map Direction and took a bus from the center of Bologna to the commune of San Lazaro and was to take another bus 126 to the bus stop of Farneto Gessi near the visitor center, but this bus 126 simply did not come.  So I decided to walk for 5 km, for half of which I managed to hitch a car.

Once arrived, I walked on the path from the visitor center to the Farneto Cave. This was rather a short and quite an easy path. I did see some rocks along the way with clearly visible gypsums.

I waited on the road until the Bus 126 back to San Lazaro came. The bus driver was not selling tickets and did not charge me for the ride. I guess only locals with a bus card ride this bus.  Now this bus dropped me off at another bus stop in San Lazaro, only half a block around the corner from the bus stop where I waited for the same bus earlier. So I guess I was waiting at a wrong bus stop, which Google Map did not specify.

The Spipola Cave

Then came the Sunday morning. The meeting place of the tour was at a parking lot called Parchegggio La Palazza near the Spipola Cave, and the meeting time was at 9:30. My plan was to take a Bus 11 from the Bologna center to the end of the line and walk the rest for 1.6 km.

The road to the parking lot was getting steeper and steeper as I walked, and I started wondering if I could arrive on time. So once again I tried to hitchhike. Soon enough a car stopped and took me in.  The car was driven by an Italian man, and his wife and two teenage children were in the car. They asked me where I was from, and when I said I was born in Japan, they all screamed, "Japan!!!" because the wife was from Japan, and children were Japanese-Italians!  Moreover, they were also going to take the same tour with me.  The rest is history among us!

We were at the parking lot at least for 30 min. prepping for the tour, meaning we were putting on protective clothes we all brought and a helmets with a head light provided. I had a jacket and a pair of sweat pants on. After the tour I was just going to take off the dirty jacket and to change into another pair of pants before boarding the airplane. 

But then I had some problems. It was most likely that my shoes would also get so dirty with dirt that Ryanair would be sorry. But before I said anything about my problem, the Japanese woman asked me for my shoe size and said I could wear her husband's extra shoes. The same concern was with my shoulder bag, and I eventually abandoned the idea of taking the bag with me, along with my phone with camera. The Italian husband will take photos and send them to me later.

I looked around the parking lot and noticed there were some very young children with a helmet on. I had to wonder why there were such young children if this tour was supposed to be such a difficult one.  I also learned that there was a main guide and two assistants who were supposed to look after us through the cave, but none of them spoke very good English...

As we all entered the cave, we found that the path along the cave was pretty slippery with wet dirt although I myself was managing not to slip and not to get too dirty. In fact I HATE to get dirty, so I tried to remain as clean as possible, an apparently wrong attitude. 

The guide stopped every once in a while to talk about ... something in Italian. I knew that his English was not good enough to explain any difficult concepts. So the Japanese woman, realizing that I was only nodding for no reason, started giving me a brief summary of what the main guide was saying. Some areas of the cave were entirely covered by gypsum, which shined as the guide shed his flashlight on.  They somehow reminded me of the Waitomo Cave with glowworms in the North Island of New Zealand.

As the tour went on, it was getting increasing difficult to navigate without getting seriously dirty.  We had to go through narrow vertical as well as horizontal opening between wet and dirty rocks. As I was struggling, I noticed that those young children were rather having fun. They were smaller than adults, so they didn't have any problem of going through those openings. The struggle applied to most of the adults, including the Japanese woman, and the next thing I noticed, she wasn't giving me the summary any more, and to be honest, preoccupied with trying to cleanse myself while the guide was talking, I wasn't even inclined to listening to her or anybody else for that matter. 

After we reached the final destination of the tour we simply returned on the same route, but the guide, instead of giving the explanation of the cave as he did on the way in, tried to make this tour more "memorable," and at some points he said things like (I'm just guessing from the context), "Let us see who can run up this slope without slipping" or "who wants to crawl through this little tunnel instead of going over those rocks as we did on the way in?" They were of course the little ones and some of their parents who seem to consider this caving tour as a Sunday morning family outing. Or is this the main object of the tour??

After almost 3 hours in the cave I was so glad that this tour was finally over.  We walked back to the parking lot where there was a water faucet, cleansed ourselves and changed into another set of clothes. The Japanese-Italian family gave me a ride to a nearby bus stop, from which I could take a direct bus back to my accommodation. I picked up my luggage and then headed to the airport. 

It wasn't until I sat in the airplane when I finally got rested and calmed down. I looked back on the tour and was shocked to realize that I had hardly learned anything about the cave!!  What OUV?? One thing for sure, however, was that if I had not met that family, my day would have been unbearably difficult...

OK, I concede that if this TWHS doesn't make it to the WH list in September 2023, taking this tour was a complete misadventure.