Bologna
©Damien Tachoires/500px
Overview
Fusing haughty elegance with down-to-earth grit in one beautifully colonnaded medieval grid, Bologna is a city of two intriguing halves. One side is a hard-working, high-tech city located in the super-rich Po valley where suave opera-goers waltz out of regal theatres and into some of the nation's finest restaurants. The other is a bolshie, politically edgy city that hosts the world's oldest university and is famous for its graffiti-embellished piazzas filled with mildly inebriated students swapping Gothic fashion tips.
01 / Attractions
Must-see attractions
Bologna
The 15th-century Palazzo Casa Fontana poi Gamberini – the fascinating, pricier-than-the-Colosseum home of eccentric Italian singer-songwriter Lucio Dalla …
Bologna
Bologna's most unique religious site is this atmospheric labyrinth of interlocking ecclesiastical structures, whose architecture spans centuries of…
Bologna
Bologna's hulking Gothic basilica is Europe's sixth-largest church, measuring 132m by 66m by 47m. Work began on it in 1390, but it was never finished, and…
Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna
Bologna
This mouthful of a museum inside Palazzo Sanguinetti – the former home of Napoleon's Italian minister – chronicles six centuries of European musical…
San Colombano – Collezione Tagliavini
Bologna
An absolutely stunningly restored church with original frescoes and a medieval crypt rediscovered in 2005, the San Colombano hosts a wonderful collection…
Bologna
FICO, the world's largest agri-food park, opened in 2017 to equal parts cheering and sneering in a formerly dilapidated wholesale farmers' market 7km…
Bologna
The palace that forms the western flank of Piazza Maggiore has been home to the Bologna city council since 1336. A salad of architectural styles, it owes…
Bologna
Bologna's two leaning towers are the city's main symbol. The taller of the two, the 97.2m-high Torre degli Asinelli (the tallest leaning medieval tower in…
02 / Plan with a local
03 / Articles
Latest stories from Bologna
Art and CultureA new way to see Bologna's porticoes, one of Italy's newest Unesco World Heritage sitesFeb 11, 2022 • 4 min read
HistoryA remarkable Renaissance masterpiece is returning to its Italian home for the first time in 300 yearsFeb 12, 2020 • 2 min read
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