Bologna

• 1. Introduction

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  Bologna stands at a crossroads that has attracted settlers, scholars, soldiers, and saints for nearly three thousand years. Traces of human habitation in the area reach back to the 3rd millennium BCE, and by roughly the 9th century BCE a culture the archaeologists call Villanovan had already taken root here. Today the city holds 390,734 people of 150 different nationalities, and its metropolitan province counts more than one million. But numbers alone do not explain why this particular patch of northern Italy, tucked between the Po Plain and the Apennine Mountains, became the city that built the oldest continuously operating university in the world, survived bombardment that damaged or destroyed 43 percent of all its buildings, and gave Italy one of its first prime ministers.

  Bologna is known by four nicknames: la grassa, the fat; la rossa, the red; la turrita, the towered; and la dotta, the learned. Each name points toward a different layer of the city's character. Together they sketch the outline of a place that is simultaneously a food capital, a political fortress, a medieval skyline, and an intellectual engine. The questions worth pursuing are how those identities grew, how they collided, and what Bologna looks like when all four are in the frame at once.

• 2. The City Before Italy

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  Felsina is the name the Etruscans gave this place, established by the end of the 6th century BCE. Within a few generations the Gaulish Boii displaced them, and in 196 BCE Rome planted a colony here under the name Bononia. That Roman name survives, slightly worn, as Bologna today. The Via Emilia, the Roman road that still runs straight through the city under changing names, shows how thoroughly Rome's grid logic shaped the urban fabric.

  After the Western Roman Empire collapsed, Bologna suffered repeated sacking. Legendary Bishop Petronius, according to ancient chronicles, rebuilt the ruined town and founded the basilica of Saint Stephen. Petronius is still revered as the city's patron saint. In 727-728 the Lombards under King Liutprand sacked and captured the city, and their engineers added a new quarter called the addizione longobarda near the complex of Saint Stephen. Charlemagne's troops arrived in 774 on behalf of Pope Adrian I and folded Bologna into the Carolingian Empire as a frontier mark.

  The medieval city took on its most distinctive physical feature during the 12th and 13th centuries, when rival families erected up to 180 defensive towers. No more than 24 survive today. The most famous are the Due Torri, the twin towers Asinelli and Garisenda, whose leaning forms became the popular symbol of the city. Walking the streets of the historical centre, which at 350 acres is the second largest in Europe, means navigating a Roman grid still legible beneath the medieval architecture.

• 3. The University and Its World

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  In 1088, scholars at Bologna organized what would become the oldest university in continuous operation anywhere. The institution was originally called the Studium, and it began not with lecture halls but with individual masters collecting fees from students on a personal basis, spread across the city without a fixed headquarters. The legal scholar Irnerius, active from around 1050, anchored its early intellectual identity as a center for the study of medieval Roman law.

  The Studium attracted names that resonate across centuries. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio all studied here. Thomas Becket came from England. Copernicus arrived from Poland. Erasmus of Rotterdam passed through. Pope Nicholas V, who founded the Vatican Library, was also a student. In 1732, Laura Bassi was appointed to a teaching post, becoming the first woman to officially hold a university chair in Europe. Luigi Galvani, who discovered bioelectricity, worked at the institution, as did Guglielmo Marconi, the pioneer of radio technology.

  The word universitas itself was coined at Bologna's foundation. Today the university operates 11 schools, 33 departments, and 93 libraries across the city and four satellite campuses in Cesena, Forli, Ravenna, and Rimini. Its botanical garden, the Orto Botanico dell'Universita di Bologna, was established in 1568 and is the fourth oldest in Europe. As of 2015, more than 80,000 students were enrolled, making Bologna still very much a university city. The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies opened its Bologna Center in 1955, the first overseas campus of any American graduate school in Europe, explicitly inspired by Marshall Plan ambitions to build a cultural bridge across the Atlantic.

• 4. Towers, Porticoes, and Sacred Stone

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  The Portico di San Luca is possibly the world's longest covered walkway. Its 666 vault arcades stretch almost four kilometres, connecting Porta Saragozza, one of the twelve medieval gates, to the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca on a hill 289 metres above the city. The church itself was begun in 1723 on the site of an 11th-century edifice already enlarged in the 14th century. Every year since 1433, a procession has carried a Byzantine icon of the Madonna with Child, attributed by tradition to Luke the Evangelist, down through those arcades to the Bologna Cathedral during the Feast of the Ascension.

  In total, Bologna's historical centre contains around 38 kilometres of porticoes, with more than 45 kilometres across the city proper. UNESCO declared them a World Heritage Site in 2021. They are not merely decorative; they allow a pedestrian to walk for long distances through the city without exposure to rain or sun, a civic amenity that has shaped how Bolognese street life functions for centuries.

  San Petronio Basilica, constructed between 1388 and 1479 and still unfinished, is the tenth largest church in the world by volume: 132 metres long, 66 metres wide, with a vault reaching 45 metres inside and 51 metres at the facade. Its volume of 258,000 cubic metres makes it the largest brick church ever built, Gothic or otherwise. The Basilica of Saint Dominic, a 13th-century Romanic structure, contains the monumental tombs of two eminent legal scholars, Rolandino de' Passeggeri and Egidio Foscherari. The Bentivoglio Altarpiece by Lorenzo Costa hangs in San Giacomo Maggiore, a reminder that the family who ruled Bologna as a signoria for decades also funded some of the city's finest Renaissance art.

• 5. War, Occupation, and Resistance

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  On the 24th of July 1943, Allied bombers struck Bologna in a massive raid that destroyed a significant part of the historic city centre and killed around 200 people. The main railway station and surrounding areas were severely hit, with 44 percent of buildings in the centre listed as destroyed or severely damaged. The city was bombed again on the 25th of September 1943. Those raids, which extended beyond the centre, killed 2,481 people and injured 2,000. By the end of the war, 43 percent of all buildings in Bologna had been destroyed or damaged.

  After the armistice of 1943, Bologna became a significant node of the Italian resistance movement. On the 7th of November 1944, partisans of the 7th Brigade of the Gruppi d'Azione Patriottica fought a pitched battle around Porta Lame against Fascist and Nazi forces. The battle was one of the largest resistance-led urban conflicts in the European theatre, though it did not trigger the general uprising its organizers had hoped for.

  Resistance forces entered Bologna on the morning of the 21st of April 1945. The Germans had largely already withdrawn in the face of Allied advance, spearheaded by Polish forces coming from the east during the Battle of Bologna, which had been underway since the 9th of April. The first unit to reach the city centre was the 87th Infantry Regiment of the Friuli Combat Group under General Arturo Scattini, entering through Porta Maggiore. The soldiers wore British uniforms, and local inhabitants initially assumed they were Allied troops. When residents heard the soldiers speaking Italian, they came into the streets to celebrate. The cooperative movement that would shape the post-war city's economy had its roots in 19th-century social struggles among farmers and workers, and by the 21st century it would account for up to a third of the region's GDP, employing 265,000 people across Emilia-Romagna.

• 6. The Red City and Its Politics

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  Between 1945 and 1999, every mayor of Bologna came from the Italian Communist Party or its successor parties. The first was Giuseppe Dozza. This unbroken left-wing succession was the backbone of the city's identity as a political stronghold, and it reinforced the nickname la rossa, though that name had originally referred to the terracotta colour of the buildings rather than to political ideology.

  In 1977 Bologna was the scene of serious rioting connected to the Movement of 1977, a spontaneous political wave of that period. The police shooting of a far-left activist, Francesco Lorusso, set off two days of street clashes. Then, on the 2nd of August 1980, at the height of what Italians call the years of lead, a bomb exploded in the central railway station, killing 85 people and wounding 200. The attack is known in Italy as the Bologna massacre. In 1995, members of the neo-fascist group Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari were convicted for carrying it out. Licio Gelli, Grand Master of the underground Freemason lodge Propaganda Due, was convicted for obstructing the investigation, along with three agents of the military intelligence service SISMI, including Francesco Pazienza and Pietro Musumeci. Commemorations take place every year on the 2nd of August, closing with a concert in the main square.

  The left's grip on city hall finally broke in 1999 when independent centre-right candidate Giorgio Guazzaloca won the mayoral election. Bologna returned to the left in 2004 with Sergio Cofferati, a former trade union leader. In 2021, Matteo Lepore won the mayoralty with 61.9 percent of the vote, the highest share for any Bologna mayor since direct elections were introduced in 1995. Bologna intends to become carbon neutral by 2040, and since 2022 its urban planning has integrated gender perspectives into decisions about mobility, public infrastructure, and green spaces.

• 7. Food, Sport, and Daily Life

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  The nickname la grassa points toward a culinary tradition that is specific enough to have created genuine confusion outside Italy. In Bologna, the ragù known to the wider world as Bolognese sauce is served primarily with tagliatelle; serving it with spaghetti is considered odd in the city that gave the sauce its name. Mortadella Bologna, tortellini served in broth, and fresh egg pasta made with butter rather than oil are among the staples. Traditional desserts follow the liturgical calendar: fave dei morti, almond paste cookies for All Saints' Day; jam-filled raviole for Saint Joseph's Day; sfrappole, a fried pastry dusted with powder sugar, for carnival.

  Unlike most Italian cities, Bologna's most followed sport is basketball rather than football. The city carries the nickname Basket City in recognition of its two historic rival clubs, Virtus and Fortitudo. Virtus has won 17 Italian basketball championships, two EuroLeagues, one EuroCup, and one FIBA Saporta Cup, making them among the most decorated clubs in European club basketball. The Italian Basketball League keeps its headquarters in Bologna.

  Football also has deep roots. Bologna FC 1909 has won seven Italian league championships, the most recent in 1963-64, placing it sixth in the all-time history of the Italian top division. In their 1930s peak the club carried the nickname Lo squadrone che tremare il mondo fa, meaning The Team that Shakes the World. The club plays at the 38,000-capacity Stadio Renato Dall'Ara, which hosted matches at the 1990 FIFA World Cup. The club's 2024-2025 Coppa Italia title is the third in its history. Rugby Bologna 1928, as of 2026 Italy's oldest rugby union club still in active operation, was also the first club affiliated to the Italian rugby federation, taking part in the top tier of the Italian championship for its first 25 years of existence.

• 8. A City in the World

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  Bologna was named a UNESCO City of Music on the 26th of May 2006, the first Italian city to enter the network. UNESCO cited a rich musical tradition spanning classical, electronic, jazz, folk, and opera, and pointed to the city's commitment to using music as a vehicle for inclusion and economic development. The Orchestra Mozart, founded in 2004 with Claudio Abbado as its music director until his death in 2014, was one expression of that tradition.

  In 2000 Bologna was declared European Capital of Culture. In 2022, Il Sole 24 Ore ranked it the best city in Italy for overall quality of life, though it had moved to fourth place by 2025. The Metropolitan City of Bologna generated a total GDP of around 35 billion euros in 2017, with a per capita figure that ranked third among all Italian provinces, behind only Milan and Bolzano. Bologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport handled 11 million passengers in 2025, ranking it seventh busiest in Italy. Bologna Centrale railway station serves 58 million passengers annually.

  Bologna is twinned with cities on five continents, from Leipzig and Toulouse in Europe to Portland, Oregon, and St. Louis in the United States, to Saint-Louis in Senegal and La Plata in Argentina. The first twinning, with Zagreb, dates to 1961. The porticoes that connect the city's life, declared a World Heritage Site in 2021, stretch past the Sanctuary of San Luca on their hill, visible from the plain, and a Byzantine icon continues its annual descent through those arcades toward the cathedral at Ascension, as it has done every year since 1433.