🇮🇹 Italy · Northern Italy (Veneto, Lombardy and Liguria)
Bologna is one of those Italian cities that win you over slowly and without tricks: it has no single icon like the Tower of Pisa or the Colosseum, but an atmosphere that soaks into everything. It is the city of the porticoes — more than 60 kilometres of covered galleries, now Unesco World Heritage, under which you can cross half the city without getting wet — of red roofs and bricks, of leaning medieval towers and of an imposing main square. And it is, above all, a young and lively city, because it is home to the oldest university in the western world, founded in 1088, which fills its streets with students from all over Europe.
It is also, with good reason, the food capital of Italy. Emilia-Romagna is the birthplace of tagliatelle al ragù, tortellini in brodo, mortadella, parmesan and the balsamic vinegar of neighbouring Modena. You eat wonderfully here and without pretension, in trattorias and osterie where the pasta is still rolled by hand. One fact Bolognese people love to clear up: the 'spaghetti bolognese' served across half the world does not exist in Bologna; ragù goes with tagliatelle, never with spaghetti.
This guide takes you through Bologna with a practical, pleasure-seeking eye: how to arrive by train or from the airport on the Marconi Express, what to see in the historic centre — from Piazza Maggiore to the Two Towers and the porticoes of San Luca — the real state of the sights (such as climbing the towers), where and what to eat without going wrong, and how to use it as a base for the rest of Emilia-Romagna. A city for walking, eating and leaving with the urge to come back.
Before it was Italian or Roman, Bologna was Etruscan: it was called Felsina and was one of the most important cities of northern Etruria. The Boii Gauls occupied it in the 4th century BC, and in 189 BC Rome founded the colony of Bononia there, on the Via Emilia. In the Middle Ages it became a prosperous free commune and, in 1088, its university was born, the oldest in the western world, which drew students from all over Europe. The medieval towers remain from the power of its noble families, among them the famous Two Towers, the Asinelli and the Garisenda. After the struggles between Guelphs and Ghibellines, the city gradually fell under the power of the Church and was part of the Papal States for centuries, until the unification of Italy in the 19th century. In the 20th century, Bologna was a stronghold of the anti-fascist Resistance and, after the war, the 'red Bologna' governed by the left. On 2 August 1980 it suffered the worst terrorist attack in the history of the Italian Republic. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Italy of trade and industry: Venice and its thousand-year maritime republic, the Milan of the Visconti and the Sforza, the Genoa of the navigators, learned Bologna and the economic engine that turned Italy into an industrial power.
Read the history of Northern Italy (Veneto, Lombardy and Liguria) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before its towers and its porticoes, Bologna was already an important city, though under another name and another language. In the first millennium BC the site was occupied by peoples of the so-called Villanovan culture, and around the 6th-5th centuries BC it became Felsina, one of the main Etruscan cities north of the Apennines. The Etruscans transformed the place: they put up brick buildings, drained marshy ground and dug canals connecting the city with the Adriatic. From that prosperous Felsina there remain rich necropolises with carved funerary stelae, kept today in the Civic Archaeological Museum.
Around the 4th century BC, the city was conquered by the Boii Gauls, a Celtic tribe that dominated the region (Cisalpine Gaul) for almost two centuries. But Bologna's fate, like that of almost all of Italy, was finally decided in Rome. After defeating the Boii, the Roman Senate founded the colony of Bononia there in 189 BC, on the very site of ancient Felsina. The new city was laid out on the typical Roman grid — still recognisable in the chequerboard of the centre — and was crossed by the Via Emilia, the great road that linked northern Italy and gave the whole region, Emilia, its name. Under Rome, Bononia was a rich and populous city, a road junction on the fertile Po plain, until the crisis of the Empire and the invasions of late Antiquity plunged it, like so many others, into decline.
After dark centuries, Bologna revived strongly in the High Middle Ages. Between the 11th and 12th centuries it organised itself as a free commune, a city-state governed by its own citizens that gradually won autonomy from the Holy Roman Empire; 1116, with a charter from Emperor Henry V, is usually pointed to as a key date for those liberties. It was one of the most powerful communes in northern Italy, with its own territory, army and a flourishing economy based on trade, crafts and the water canals that drove mills and silk workshops.
But medieval Bologna's greatest legacy is neither military nor commercial: it is intellectual. In 1088 — by convention, since in reality it emerged gradually — the University of Bologna was born there, considered the oldest in the western world, the Alma Mater Studiorum. No king or pope founded it: it grew out of the meeting of masters and students, above all around the study of Roman law, which drew young people from all over Europe. Bologna thus became la Dotta, the Learned, a beacon of legal knowledge where generations of jurists trained and through which, over the centuries, figures such as Dante, Petrarch, Copernicus and Erasmus of Rotterdam would pass. That university, still alive and crowded, is what continues to give the city its young, cosmopolitan character: a thread of almost a thousand years connecting today's students with the first who came to study law in the 11th century.
Medieval Bologna was also a city of towers. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, noble families competed by raising ever taller towers, symbols of power and prestige (and, if it came to it, defensive refuges). The city bristled with them: legend speaks of almost two hundred, though the real figure was surely lower; some twenty survive today. The two most famous stand together right in the centre: the Torre degli Asinelli, the taller one, and the Garisenda, famous for its pronounced lean, which as early as the 14th century impressed Dante enough for him to mention it in the Divine Comedy. Those leaning towers are still, today, the symbol of Bologna.
The 13th century was one of splendour but also of conflict. Like all of communal Italy, Bologna tore itself apart in the struggles between Guelphs (backers of the pope) and Ghibellines (backers of the emperor); in 1249 it went so far as to capture and hold for life Enzo, son of Emperor Frederick II, in the palace that today bears his name. Over time, the victory of the Guelph faction and internal divisions brought the city closer to the Church's orbit. After episodes of one-family rule — such as that of the Bentivoglio, who dominated Bologna in the 15th century in a phase of Renaissance brilliance — the city ended up fully absorbed into the Papal States. For centuries, Bologna was the second most important city in the Church's state after Rome, governed by a papal legate. That long papal rule, which lasted until the unification of Italy in the mid-19th century, left a deep mark on its churches, its palaces and the very fabric of the city.
In 1860, during the unification of Italy (the Risorgimento), Bologna and the papal Legations joined the new Kingdom of Italy by plebiscite, ending centuries of papal government. The city entered the modern era as the capital of Emilia, industrialised, grew beyond its medieval walls (largely pulled down in the early 20th century) and developed a strong tradition of associations, cooperatives and labour organising that would shape its political identity.
That identity was tested in the 20th century. Bologna saw fascist violence from its beginnings in the 1920s and, during the Second World War, was one of the great centres of the Italian anti-fascist Resistance. The city and its mountains were partisan territory, and it paid a very high price: Allied bombing that destroyed part of the centre, German occupation and atrocities such as the Marzabotto massacre, in the Bolognese Apennines, where in 1944 the SS murdered hundreds of civilians. Bologna was liberated on 21 April 1945.
Out of that experience came the postwar 'red Bologna': for decades the city was governed by the left (the Communist Party and its heirs) and became a kind of showcase of local 'good government', with public services, careful town planning and social policies cited as a model inside and outside Italy. That progressive profile, together with its university, made Bologna a centre of cultural and political ferment, especially intense in the student and countercultural movements of the 1970s.
Bologna's recent history is marked by a deep wound. On 2 August 1980, at 10:25 in the morning, a bomb hidden in a suitcase went off in the second-class waiting room of Bologna Centrale station, packed with travellers at the very start of the summer holidays. The blast collapsed the west wing of the building. Eighty-five people died and more than 200 were injured: it was the most serious terrorist attack in the history of the Italian Republic.
The massacre (the strage di Bologna) was attributed from the start to neo-fascist terrorism and belongs to what became known as the 'strategy of tension', a series of attacks that bloodied Italy in the 1970s and 1980s. The investigations and trials, extremely long and complex, convicted far-right militants as the direct perpetrators, and over the years also pointed to instigators and accessories linked to the secret Masonic lodge P2 and to parts of the intelligence services. The courts went on ruling for decades: in 2025, the Court of Cassation definitively upheld a life sentence for one of those responsible. Every 2 August, Bologna stops: at 10:25 silence falls in memory of the victims, whose names are engraved in the station, and the clock on the façade stays for ever at the time of the explosion.
Today Bologna is a prosperous, cultured and fun-loving city, proud of its three nicknames — the Learned, the Fat and the Red — of its porticoes, listed as World Heritage in 2021, and of a university that has passed nine centuries. But it also keeps, soberly and without forgetting, the memory of that day in 1980, as an inseparable part of what the city is.