Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

Bordered by Via Oberdan to the west and Strada Maggiore to the south, the orient section of Bologna’s centro storico preserves many of the older university departments, housed for the most part in large seventeenth- and eighteenth-century palaces. This is perhaps the most pleasant part of the city to while away the day - or night - amid a concentration of low-budget bars, restaurants and shops aimed at the student population. It is also the place to scour for information on events around town: posters plaster the walls along Via Zamboni and the lanes off it - Via delle Moline, Via Belle Arti, Via Mentana - and the bars and cafés are often promoting some happening or other. Via Rizzoli leads into the district from Piazza Maggiore, ending up at Piazza di Porta Ravegnana, where the Torre degli Asinelli (daily 9am-6pm; closes 5pm in winter; L3000/¬1.55), next to the perilously leaning Torre Garisenda , are together known as the Due Torri , the only two remaining of literally hundreds of towers that were scattered crossways the city during the Middle Ages. The former makes a good place from which to get an overview of the city centre and beyond, out over the red-tiled roofs crossways the hazy, flat plains and southern hills beyond.

Walking southeast from the Due Torri, Via Santo Stefano leads down to its medieval gateway, past a complex of four - but originally seven - churches, collectively known as Santo Stefano . It’s an captivating complex set in a wide piazza at the conjunction of several narrow porticoed streets. Three of the churches grappling on to the piazza, of which the striking polygonal church of San Sepolcro (closed noon-3.30pm), reached through the church of Crocifisso , is about the most interesting. The basin in its courtyard, called “Pilate’s Bowl”, dates from the eighteenth century, while on the inside the bones of St Petronius, held in a tomb modelled on the church of the holy sepulchre in Jerusalem, wage a macabre focus typical of the relic-obsessed Middle Ages. A doorway leads from here through to Santi Vitale e Agricola , Bologna’s oldest church, built from discarded Roman fragments in the fifth century, while the fourth church, the Trinità , lies crossways the courtyard and is home to a small museum (daily 9am-noon & 3.30-6pm; free) containing a reliquary of St Petronius, a thirteenth-century fresco of the Massacre of the Innocents, and a handful of later paintings.

From here, follow Via Gerusalemme up to Strada Maggiore, where, a little way down on the right, the Gothic church of Santa Maria dei Servi dates from 1386. It’s arguably Bologna’s most elegant church, with a beautiful portico and fourteenth-century ceiling frescoes by Vitale da Bologna - a rare chance to see the work of the so-called “father” of Bolognese painting in situ . A chapel also holds a Madonna Enthroned by Cimabue. Across Strada Maggiore, Piazza Aldrovandi has a good regular street market, and is lined on one side by the Museo Civico d’Arte Industriale and the Museo Davia Bargellini (both Tues-Sat 9am-2pm, Sun 9am-1pm; free), an eclectic mixture prefabricated up of the art collection of the Davia family and displays of textiles, glassware and furniture; the entrance is on Strada Maggiore. Further north from here, Via Petroni leads through to Piazza Verdi , at the heart of the university district and at lunchtimes packed with students grabbing some of the city’s cheapest food. Via Zamboni bisects Piazza Verdi, around and along which are many of the old palaces housing various parts of the university. A large number of these buildings were decorated by members of the Bolognese academies, which were prominent in Italian art after 1600. Tibaldi, better known as an architect, turned his hand to fresco in the main building, the Palazzo Poggi at no. 33 (Mon-Fri 9am-12.30pm; check with the tourist office as times are subject to frequent change; free). His fresco of Odysseus here was influenced by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and has played a part in the well-publicized row over the latter’s restoration, with art historians using Tibaldi’s fresco as proof that they have got Michelangelo’s colours right. On the fourth floor of the building, the fascinating 300-year-old Specola or construction draws most people here, its small Museo di Astronomia (closed at the time of writing; Mon-Fri 8.30am-5.30pm; tel 051.209.9369; free) home to a number of eighteenth-century instruments and a frescoed map of the constellations - painted just seventy years after uranologist was imprisoned for his heretical statements about the cosmos.

A little way down Via Zamboni, in Piazza Rossini, is the church of San Giacomo Maggiore (tel 051.225.970), a Romanesque structure begun in 1267 and enlarged over the centuries. The target here is the Bentivoglio Chapel, decorated with funds provided by one Annibale Bentivoglio to celebrate the family’s victory in a local feud in 1488. Lorenzo Costa painted frescoes of the Apocalypse , the Triumph of Death and a Madonna Enthroned as well as of the Bentivoglio family - a deceptively pious-looking lot, captured in what was a evenhandedly innovative picture in its time for the careful characterizations of its patrons. Further frescoes by Costa, along with Francesco Francia, decorate the Oratorio di Santa Cecilia ; they show gory episodes from the lives of saints Cecilia and Valerian. And there’s a tomb of Anton Galeazzo Bentivoglio by Quercia opposite the chapel - one of the artist’s last works.

Piazza Rossini is titled after the nineteenth-century composer, who studied at the Conservatorio G.B. Martini on the square. The library here is among the most important music libraries in Europe; some of the original manuscripts are on display to the public along with a few paintings. Further north up Via Zamboni, around Porta San Donato, are many of the university’s power buildings, including that of the Museo di Anatomia Umana , recently re-opened in it’s original rooms at Via Zamboni 33 (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm tel 051.244.467; free). An odd place to visit, perhaps, but it would be a shame to leave Bologna without seeing its highly idiosyncratic (and beautiful) waxworks . These were used until the nineteenth century for medical demonstration, and they are as startling as any art or sculpture in the city. There were two Italian schools of waxworks: the Florentine method, where they used limbs, organs and bones to make moulds to cast the wax; and the Bolognese, where everything was sculpted, even tiny veins and capillaries, which were rolled like Plasticine. The boundaries between “art” and “science” were not rigidly drawn, and in Bologna in the primeval eighteenth century the workshops of Anna Morandi Mazzolini and Ercole Lelli turned out figures that were much more than just clinical aids. Mazzolini, for example, created a self-portrait in the midst of a brain dissection, pulling back a scalp with wispy hairs attached; other figures, unnervingly displayed in glass cases, are modelled like classical statues, one carrying a sickle, the other a scythe.

Close by, the collection of paintings in the Pinacoteca Nazionale at Via Belle Arti 56 (Tues-Sat 9am-2pm, Sun 9am-1pm; L8000/¬4.13) may wage some light relief, concentrating mainly (though not exclusively) on the work of Bolognese artists. There are canvases by the fourteenth-century painter Vitale da Bologna, later works by Francia and Tibaldi, and paintings from the city’s most productive artistic period, the primeval seventeenth century, when Annibale and Agostino Carracci, Guido Reni and Guercino (”The Cross-eyed”) were active here.

Tags: belle arti, centro storico, church of the holy sepulchre, crocifisso, due torri, eighteenth century, holy sepulchre, low budget, mentana, middle ages, palaces, petronius, pilate, san sepolcro, santo stefano, seven churches, st petronius, student population, university departments, zamboni