Guy and Laura are here after a week spent camping near the Swiss border. The scenery was wonderful and thankfully they had some good weather after a wet start.
The weather has been damp and dull for their stay in Bologna up to now, but today is turning out better and they have taken themselves off to Modena, which we visited a couple of weeks ago.
Yesterday we showed them round the Anatomical Theatre where human corpses were dissected for the training of medical students in the seventeenth century.
Bologna was at the forefront in the training of doctors at this time and wax modellers reproduced human body parts for educative purposes.
In one museum there are wax models showing a series of foetuses inside the womb, each foetus presented in a different position for birth eg breech and transverse, and in a second museum abnormalities of the foetus (mostly extremely rare) were modelled for prospective obstetricians.
Also to be seen are the effects of various diseases.
How wonderful it would be, I thought, if one day in the future, diseases that people suffer from today will only exist as exhibits in museums. Smallpox has now been eradicated according to the World Health Organisation, the last known case having been in Somalia in 1977.
Unfortunately, it has proved more of a challenge to rid the world of leprosy.
After the macabre waxworks we popped into the Botanical Gardens.
Tortoise Travel 
How lovely to have Guy and Laura with you!
I wouldn’t have recognised him – do please give him my best wishes!
Sure that you’ll have a lovely time all together and will enjoy your new status as “Local Guides”!
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