Bologna? A destination to discover. Giosuè Carducci, who loved it deeply, complained that Italians did not know it as much as it deserved. A great city of art, it holds dizzying treasures in the dim light of churches, oratories, palaces, which can never be fully embraced because of those porticos so unique and so mysterious, which always direct the gaze towards horizontal depths and never verticals. It is perhaps to fill this debt of height that the towers were born. A crenellated forest of stone shafts that, at the dawn of the thirteenth century, made Bologna a sort of Manhattan ante litteram. The porticos invite to meet, but also to meditation, to contemplation. It is no coincidence that the most absolute silences in painting were born here, those of Giorgio Morandi, author of still lifes of only bottles that have the dignity of architecture and seem to be the ideal and abstract transposition of the city, with its noble turreted profile. Here are 10 addresses not to be missed: the reader will have the pleasure of discovering much more.
PIAZZA MAGGIORE
In his most famous song, Lucio Dalla calls it “Piazza Grande”. It is Piazza Maggiore, “bold and fantastic” according to Giosué Carducci, a shining, spectacular testimony to the splendor of Bologna in the age of the communes.

Monumental and illusory like a theatrical set, all in terracotta and sandstone according to local customs, it is surrounded on all sides by the buildings that have written its history: the Basilica of San Petronio with its unfinished façade, the Palazzo Comunale and Palazzo del Podestà, the Palazzo dei Notai, the long portico of the Pavaglione. In the summer, the café tables transform Piazza Maggiore into an incomparable open-air lounge.
LAMENTATION OVER THE DEAD CHRIST, SANTA MARIA DELLA VITA
“No image of suffering can be more total than this,” said Vittorio Sgarbi of Niccolò dell’Arca’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1463), one of the greatest masterpieces of Renaissance sculpture and the jewel of the sanctuary of Santa Maria della Vita: six terracotta figures around the body of Christ, overwhelmed by immeasurable pain. Nicodemus of Arimathea is a stunned block; Saint John the Evangelist is a being drained by an absolute interior weeping, which does not allow any outlet; the Maries and the Madonna abandoned to a desperation that transfigures the features of the face, deforms the fingers of the hands, shakes the bodies making a storm of the clothes.


An unbearable desperation, which almost takes on the traits of madness. In the Oratory there is another astonishing 16th century group, the Transit of the Virgin by Alfonso Lombardi, with the Apostles around the coffin of the Madonna, which an unbeliever tries to overturn while being struck down by an angel.
MORANDI MUSEUM, MAMBO
“The surest – and quickest – way to amaze ourselves is to stare imperturbably at the same subject. One fine moment this object will seem to us – miraculously – as if we had never seen it before”. Cesare Pavese, in Dialogues with Leucò, does not give a lesson in criticism. But, without intending to, he enters into the mystery of the painting of the Bolognese Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), a painter of silence, a great independent in twentieth-century Italian art.

Still lifes with bottles are his almost exclusive subject and the Mambo, the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, houses the richest collection in the world. Essential almost to the point of asceticism, Morandi has touched, without ever going beyond them, the boundaries of abstraction. He has done so with a soft and rarefied palette, declined on infinite variations of ochre, pink, gray-blue. With structured, architectural volumes, of high mental rigor. With a space that becomes a dimension of the deep, a place of an immobile time, guardian of invisible traces of memory.
SANTO STEFANO COMPLEX
In Bologna, nothing is more arcane and venerable than the Romanesque complex of Santo Stefano, or the Seven Churches. A labyrinth of churches, chapels, cloisters, courtyards with a very high emotional rate, full of religious meanings and historical-artistic suggestions.

Tradition has it that it was founded in the early Christian era by San Petronio, then bishop of the city, in the image of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. Sancta santorum of Bolognese Christianity, it closes the magical perspective of Piazza Santo Stefano. A dive to the heart.
GRAND HOTEL MAJESTIC “GIÀ BAGLIONI”
The pride of five-star Bologna, it offers luxury at the highest level of style. The suites? Small masterpieces of art and art de vivre. From the Venetian-style Giuseppe Verdi to the Giambologna with pieces from the French 19th century, up to the Art Deco with the superb terrace, overlooking the roofs of the old city and the church of San Pietro (guardian of the 16th-century group of the Pietà, sculpted by Alfonso Lombardi).

Traditional cuisine dominates the large menu of the I Carracci restaurant, where tortellini in capon broth and tagliatelle with ragù reign supreme. At the Majestic Lounge Café you go to sip the house specialty, the Roberta cocktail (vodka, Cinzano dry, Cherry Hering, Campari and banana cream), and in the Camerino di Europa, a cosy meeting room, you enter to admire the Stories of Europe by the Carracci brothers, protagonists of that season of refined naturalness which throughout the seventeenth century Europe would look to as an example of beautiful painting.
NATIONAL ART GALLERY
A pantheon of Bolognese pictorial genius from the fairy-tale times of Vitale to the magnificent season of Mannerism and Baroque, the National Art Gallery preserves those glories of the city’s art admired, in deferential pilgrimage, by travellers of the name of Goethe or Stendhal. From the dawn of courtly Gothic, of which the panel with Saint George and the Dragon by Vitale da Bologna is a shining example, a tight sequence of masterpieces leads to the threshold of the seventeenth century, dominated by the titanic figures of the Carracci, Guido Reni (the Massacre of the Innocents is sensational), Guercino, Domenichino, Francesco Albani.

To them are added those foreign artists who have left an indelible mark on Bologna: from Ercole de’ Roberti and Francesco del Cossa (who signed the stupendous Pala dei Mercanti) to Perugino and Raphael (with the incomparable Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia), going back to the father of Italian painting himself, Giotto (Madonna and Child with Saints).
ANATOMICAL THEATRE OF THE ARCHIGINNASIO
The spectacular Anatomical Theatre (1637), intended for dissections of human anatomy for medical students, is a large hall in fir wood crowned by a double row of statues. Apollo, the tutelary deity of medicine, dominates from the coffered ceiling, with the symbols of the constellations.

The emblem of the Theatre is the very famous Spellati or Scorticati by Ercole Lelli: a pair of anatomical statues in lime wood that, in the manner of caryatids, support the canopy of the chair on which the allegory of Anatomy stands out.
RISTORANTE DIANA

A temple of Bolognese gastronomic tradition since 1909 where, among elegant furnishings and service, you can enjoy the great classics of the Emilian table. From the inevitable mortadella (sliced, diced or as a foam on hot crostini) to tortellini in broth, which legend has it were modeled on the shape of Venus’ navel; from tagliatelle created, according to myth, in homage to the long blond hair of Lucrezia Borgia on the occasion of her wedding to the Duke of Ferrara Alfonso I d’Este, to baked green lasagne, from passatelli to the boiled meats from the famous, monumental trolley.
LEANING TOWERS
Dante speaks of them in the XXXI canto of the Inferno, Giosuè Carducci in the Odi Barbare and Charles Dickens in Visioni padane (Pictures from Italy), in which he describes them leaning “as if to make each other a rigid reverence”.
They are the Leaning Towers, symbol of the city, named after the families who built them in the splendor of the communal age.
The Garisenda (48.16 m.) leans 3.22 m. due to a subsidence of the ground; it appears to have been cut off by the demolition, around the middle of the fourteenth century, of a dozen meters for fear of collapse.
The Asinelli Tower (97.20 m.) is the tallest; it has resisted four fires, as many earthquakes, two hurricanes and the shock wave of two bombings.
It has a slope of 2.23 m., which does not prevent the ascent along an interminable staircase of 498 very steep steps.

The summit is crowned by a panoramic terrace protected by the ancient Guelph battlements, which offers an unmissable view of one of the most beautiful and least known cities in the world.
OSTERIA DEL SOLE
In an alley behind Piazza Maggiore, in the heart of medieval Bologna, beyond a creaking glass door lies the oldest and most characteristic establishment in Bologna, the Osteria del Sole (1465). A unique address: it serves only wine, beer and some spirits; the food, purchased in the shops of the adjacent Mercato di Mezzo, is consumed in foil on its old tables.

Between walls covered with black and white photos of customers and celebrities, artists, students and pensioners move indifferently who, today as yesterday, meet for an afternoon game of cards. Every evening a bell calls for the last drink.