Bologna with the menu closed

Bologna has the kind of image problem most cities would take gladly. It is famous for its cooking, exhaustively, and the consequence is that everything else gets filed as digestion — a tower photographed on the way to a table, a piazza crossed at speed, a museum sacrificed to a long lunch. Spend three days here with the menu closed and the city rearranges itself into something stranger and better: a place of anatomy theatres and terracotta corpses, of a university quarter that still behaves like one, and of a memorial to a passenger aircraft that nobody has ever fully explained.

What follows is a ranking, which is a blunt instrument, so here is the yardstick. Each entry was judged on two things: how long it genuinely holds an interested adult who is not a specialist, and whether it still works on a wet Tuesday in November, when the terraces, the hills and the evening drift under the arcades are all unavailable. A third test — whether the same experience is easily had elsewhere in Italy — was applied and then broken on purpose at number six, which is a list of day trips; the break is flagged where it happens, and so is every fair-weather suggestion further down. The city's porticoes and its cooking are covered elsewhere on this site and are deliberately absent below.

1. Santo Stefano, and the seven churches that are not seven

Six or seven hundred metres south-east of Piazza Maggiore — eight to ten minutes through the lanes, not the five most guides claim — a sloping brick piazza rises to a complex that no amount of advance reading quite prepares you for. Santo Stefano is not one church but a knot of them, grown into each other over roughly a thousand years and known collectively as the sette chiese, though counting them honestly is a fool's errand: some were absorbed into their neighbours, some rebuilt, and the whole group was heavily reworked in the restoration campaigns of the 1870s and 1880s, which stripped later accretions and re-fronted parts of it in the medieval manner the period preferred.

Tradition holds that the site was laid out to echo the holy places of Jerusalem, and the logic survives. You pass from the Crucifix church into a dim brick rotunda, the Santo Sepolcro, built around a shrine that stands in for the tomb in Jerusalem and that long held the relics of Bologna's patron saint. Beyond it, the Cortile di Pilato is an open courtyard with a broad stone basin at its centre carrying a Lombard-era inscription, and beyond that a Romanesque cloister of stacked arcades where the capitals are worth ten minutes on their own. The oldest fabric, by tradition, belongs to the church of Saints Vitale and Agricola, and it feels it: bare, cold, assembled from salvaged Roman stone.

Allow an hour. Entry is generally free at the time of writing with a donation expected, and like most Bolognese churches the complex usually shuts for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, so the choice is early morning or the second half of the afternoon. We would take the afternoon — the low sun comes straight down the piazza and into the brick — and the itinerary at the end of this piece is built that way, but if you want the rotunda before anyone else is in it, come at opening instead. Either works; what does not work is arriving at one o'clock. The piazza outside hosts an antiques market on a monthly rhythm, usually the second weekend, with gaps in high summer — worth checking, because it changes the character of the square completely.

2. The Archiginnasio, and the room where the dissections happened

The University of Bologna is conventionally dated to 1088 and generally described as the oldest continuously operating university in Europe. That is a fact people repeat; the Archiginnasio is where it becomes visible. Built in the 1560s as the single home for a teaching body that had until then been scattered through rented rooms across the city, it now houses the municipal library — and its courtyard, staircases and loggias are plastered floor to vault with the painted and carved coats of arms of students and rectors. The usual figure given is around six thousand. Standing under them, the count feels conservative.

The reason to buy a ticket is the anatomical theatre upstairs: a small amphitheatre entirely lined in fir, tiered benches rising around a marble dissection table, a canopy overhead, and — holding up the lecturer's canopy — two flayed figures carved in the eighteenth century, muscles exposed, entirely calm about it. The Archiginnasio was hit in the Allied bombing of January 1944 and the theatre was largely destroyed; what you see was rebuilt from salvaged fragments, which is disclosed on site and does nothing to diminish it. The same ticket usually covers the Sala dello Stabat Mater next door, the university's old Aula Magna, its walls lined with student and rectorial heraldry. It takes its name from the Italian première of Rossini's Stabat Mater, a sacred work rather than an opera, given here in 1842 under Donizetti.

Budget forty minutes. Anyone left wanting more should walk ten minutes up Via Zamboni to Palazzo Poggi, where the university's older scientific collections survive: Aldrovandi's natural history cabinets, ship models, and the obstetric teaching collection assembled by Giovanni Antonio Galli — clay and glass models of the womb, and the apparatus on which trainee midwives learned to manage a delivery by touch. In the same building are the anatomical waxes of Anna Morandi Manzolini: ears, eyes, hands, the branching of nerves, and a self-portrait in which she is dissecting a brain. After her husband's death the city appointed her in her own name to a salaried position attached to the chair of anatomy, and she taught from it. Palazzo Poggi generally opens Tuesday to Sunday; confirm current hours before you commit an afternoon to it.

3. A terracotta lamentation and a marble tomb

The two works we would cross Bologna for are sculpture rather than painting, and both are easy to walk straight past.

The first is in Santa Maria della Vita, a church in the tangle of lanes just off Piazza Maggiore. In a side chapel stands the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, seven life-size terracotta figures by Niccolò dell'Arca, dated somewhere between the 1460s and 1490. Two of the mourners are in violent motion — running, drapery snapped backwards by the wind of their own arrival, mouths open — and the shock of the group comes from the contrast with the five who are not: the Virgin, John, Nicodemus, the body itself. To our eye it is the most affecting object in the city, and it takes fifteen minutes.

The second is the tomb of Saint Dominic in the basilica that bears his name, a few minutes south. The Arca is marble throughout, and it accumulated across five centuries rather than being designed: the main reliefs come from Nicola Pisano's workshop in the 1260s, the cusped lid was carved by Niccolò dell'Arca between 1469 and 1473 — he took his professional name from the job — and three small figures were added by Michelangelo in the mid-1490s, while he was out of Florence and short of work: a kneeling angel with a candlestick and two standing saints. Later hands added again in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. None of it is labelled in any obvious way; you have to look. The same church holds Guido Reni's grave, an inlaid choir of astonishing wooden trompe l'oeil, and rather more calm than the tomb of a saint usually attracts.

4. The twentieth century: Ustica, and the wall at the station

North of the centre in Bolognina, a former tram depot houses the Museo per la Memoria di Ustica. Inside, suspended and reassembled, is the wreckage of the airliner that came down between Ponza and Ustica in June 1980, killing all 81 people aboard, in circumstances that decades of investigation and litigation have not settled. Christian Boltanski built the room around it: 81 dim bulbs breathing over the fuselage, 81 black mirrors, and a low soundtrack of half-audible whispered thoughts. Entry is typically free at the time of writing, and it is a bus ride or a walk of twenty-odd minutes from the station.

The opening pattern is the thing that decides whether this visit happens at all, so deal with it before anything else. The museum is shut Monday to Wednesday all year. Through the cooler months it opens on Thursday and Friday mornings and for a longer stretch across Saturday and Sunday; in high summer, roughly from late June, it switches to evenings only, Friday to Sunday. That means there are months in which the morning visit most itineraries assume is simply not available. Check the museum's published hours against your dates first and build the day around what you find.

Pair it, if you have the stomach, with the memorial at Bologna Centrale. On 2 August 1980 a bomb in the second-class waiting room killed 85 people. Most of that part of the station was rebuilt, so what you see preserved is deliberate rather than untouched: a deep fissure left open in the rebuilt wall behind a protective panel, a floor tile pierced by the detonation, and, separately, a marble plaque carrying the 85 names. The clock on the façade outside stopped at 10:25 in the blast, was repaired, and ran normally for years; only in 1996 was it deliberately fixed at 10:25 and kept there as a permanent commemoration, which is a stranger and sadder fact than the myth that it never restarted. The memorial is inside the station, signposted from the concourse, and ten minutes covers it — the hour before a train is a perfectly honest time to stand there. It is the museum, not the memorial, that resists being fitted around other things.

5. The Pinacoteca, and the modern counterweight

The Bolognese painters — the Carracci, Guido Reni, Guercino, Elisabetta Sirani — are conventionally credited with resetting the direction of Italian painting around 1600, and their home gallery is far less busy than that reputation implies. We have had whole rooms to ourselves in the Pinacoteca Nazionale on Via delle Belle Arti on out-of-season weekday mornings. The sequence runs from Giotto and Vitale da Bologna through Raphael's Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia to the seventeenth century. Two hours is enough; ninety minutes is honest.

The counterweight sits fifteen minutes west. MAMbo occupies a converted municipal bakery, and it has also held the city's Giorgio Morandi holdings since 2012 — several decades of the same bottles and boxes, arranged and rearranged, which sounds unpromising and is quietly overwhelming when hung in quantity. That arrangement began as a temporary move after the 2012 earthquake, and the city has since bought a building on Via Azzo Gardino intending to give Morandi a permanent home of his own, so check where the collection actually is before you set off. Morandi's own flat and studio on Via Fondazza can also be visited, though on restricted days and sometimes only by arrangement.

6. The sixth entry is not in Bologna at all

This one breaks the "not easily had elsewhere in Italy" test on purpose, because basing yourself here and travelling out is a legitimate strategy and for a second visit it may be the best one. Bologna sits at the junction of Italy's main north–south and east–west lines, and the day trips are genuinely first-rank.

Ravenna, roughly an hour and a quarter away on a direct regional service, has the late-Roman and Byzantine mosaics: San Vitale, the small vaulted mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, and Sant'Apollinare in Classe a short hop further out. Eight of the city's early Christian and Byzantine buildings are inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage list, which is the plainest statement of their standing anyone can offer. A combined ticket usually covers most of the group, and timed entry to the mausoleum applies in busy months.

Modena is about half an hour by regional train: a Romanesque cathedral with carved reliefs that repay a slow circuit, the leaning Ghirlandina beside it, a covered market, and — for those so inclined — the Museo Enzo Ferrari, which is the Modena one, walkable from the station. The larger Museo Ferrari, the one most people picture, is at Maranello, roughly 18 km south and reached by a separate shuttle bus or by car; it does not fit inside a half-day built around Modena, and booking the wrong museum is an easy and expensive mistake. Ferrara, similarly close, is a moated Este castle and a flat Renaissance grid built for cycling. Florence is roughly forty minutes on a high-speed service, which makes a day there entirely feasible and rather cheaper than sleeping in it.

One practical trap: Bologna Centrale has two levels, and there is no reliable rule mapping train type to level. The underground platforms, several floors down and reached by long escalators, serve the high-speed Milan–Florence–Rome axis; fast services running east and north-east — towards Venice, Verona, Rimini and Ancona — often leave from the surface platforms instead. Read the departure board rather than assuming, and allow fifteen minutes inside the station rather than five.

What we would skip, and what is better than its reputation

The little window on Via Piella that looks onto the surviving canal has become a queue for a photograph of a gap. The canal network itself is the more interesting story — most of it culverted under the streets, opened up here and there on guided walks that a local association runs on booked dates.

A different underground site, and not part of the canal system at all, is worth more effort: a sixteenth-century water reservoir cut into the sandstone under the hill on the southern edge of the centre, in the Valverde district beyond Porta San Mamolo. Built in 1563 to a design by Tommaso Laureti, it was made to supply the Neptune fountain on Piazza Maggiore, and it is a set of cool cruciform chambers rather than a tunnel. A volunteer association opens it on booked guided visits; slots go quickly, so plan ahead or let it go. Note the direction: it is south of Piazza Maggiore, not west.

The medieval towers need managing expectations. The Garisenda has been fenced and braced since the works began in late 2023, and the Asinelli — 498 steps, the classic Bologna view — was closed to climbers alongside it. Whether either has reopened by the time you read this is worth confirming before you build a morning around it. In the meantime the clock tower at Palazzo d'Accursio sells timed tickets and delivers the roofscape; the wider view, weather permitting, is from the hills south of the walls.

San Petronio deserves better than a photograph

The great unfinished brick basilica on Piazza Maggiore is walked into and out of by most visitors in four minutes. It rewards twenty. A brass meridian line laid by the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini in the 1650s runs down the left aisle as you enter — about 67 metres of it, a long stretch of the church rather than its full length — and it is long cited among the largest solar instruments of its kind. A hole in the vault throws a disc of sunlight onto the brass, and the calendar dates are marked along the floor. In a chapel off the same aisle, Giovanni da Modena frescoed a Dantean Hell in unnerving detail. Photography inside is charged for, generally as a small permit at the door.

Two things that cost nothing at the time of writing also earn their place: the vaulted passage beneath the Palazzo del Podestà, where a whisper into one corner arrives clearly in the diagonally opposite one, and the Salaborsa library in Palazzo d'Accursio, whose glass floor looks down onto excavated Roman and medieval foundations. Neither takes ten minutes. Further out, the monumental cemetery at the Certosa is generally free to enter, half-empty and full of nineteenth-century funerary sculpture of real quality.

Making it fit

Two full days covers the ranking with a little slack; three lets you breathe. A workable order: start with San Petronio on Piazza Maggiore on your first morning and then the Archiginnasio, which is not on the same square but immediately behind the basilica on Piazza Galvani, two minutes round its flank; cross to Santa Maria della Vita and San Domenico before the midday closures; take Santo Stefano in the late afternoon, when the light comes down the piazza, once it has reopened.

The second day depends entirely on the Ustica museum's hours for your dates. If it opens in the morning, give it the morning and the Pinacoteca or MAMbo the afternoon. If your dates fall in the summer evenings-only stretch, invert the day: gallery first, museum last, and do not plan anything after it. Keep the third day for Ravenna. If the forecast is kind, spend it instead on the hills south of the walls, where the park above the city and the terrace at San Michele in Bosco give you Bologna laid out flat and red — that is the one suggestion in this piece that a wet November day cancels outright, which is why it is an alternative rather than an entry.

Before you book

Monday is the weak day: several civic museums close, some also close Tuesday, and church opening is at its most erratic. Check each one individually rather than assuming a common pattern. Churches typically shut for two or three hours in the middle of the day, and in our experience that is what wrecks more Bologna itineraries than anything else — plan the indoor secular things for the early afternoon and you sidestep it.

Bologna is a trade-fair city, and a large fair fills every hotel room for miles and pushes rates far above normal — check the fairground calendar before fixing dates, particularly around Cersaie, the ceramics fair usually held in late September, and Arte Fiera, the art fair usually held in the depths of winter. August empties the city of Bolognese and closes a good deal of it, while late June brings Il Cinema Ritrovato, the restored-film festival, and free open-air screenings on Piazza Maggiore that typically run through the summer evenings.

The historic centre is a restricted traffic zone and is comfortably walkable end to end — about twenty minutes from the station to Piazza Maggiore. From the airport, the automated elevated shuttle, the Marconi Express, runs to the station in well under ten minutes; expect around €13 for a standard single at the time of writing, several times a city bus fare, so confirm the current price and decide accordingly.