Four days in Bologna: the city that has never heard of spaghetti bolognese
Three nights under the porticoes, with the oldest university in the world on the doorstep and a day of Byzantine mosaics an hour down the line.
- Length
- 4 days, 3 nights
- Where you stay
- Bologna
- Places
- 9 across 4 days
Bologna has three old nicknames: the learned, the fat and the red. The first is the university, which has been running since 1088 and still fills the centre with twenty-somethings. The second is the food, and it is not an exaggeration. The third was the brick, and then it was the politics, and it is still both.
It is a rare thing in Italy: a beautiful medieval city that is not primarily a tourist destination. People here are going to work, to lectures and to dinner. Prices are what people who live somewhere are willing to pay, restaurants are booked out by locals rather than by tour groups, and nothing has queues except a couple of the food shops.
The other unusual feature is architectural. Nearly forty kilometres of covered arcade run through the historic centre, put up over eight centuries so that the upper floors of houses could be extended over the street. You can cross the whole city in a downpour without getting wet, and after a day of it you start resenting cities that make you carry an umbrella.
Highlights
- An anatomy theatre carved entirely from spruce, with two skinned figures holding up the canopy
- A terracotta Lamentation from the 1460s that people still describe as a scream in clay
- A cathedral half faced in marble and half left as bare brick, with a sundial cut into the floor
- Ravenna's mosaics, an hour away, gold and unchanged since the sixth century
Where to stay
Bologna, three nights
A city of red brick, arcades and towers, built rich on trade and law, and never rebuilt in stone because brick was what the plain had. Medieval families competed by building towers, well over a hundred of them at the peak, and about twenty are still standing in various states of lean.
Three nights gives you the centre properly, one full day elsewhere, and the thing Bologna is really for, which is eating three meals a day in a place where that is taken seriously by everybody.
Day by day
Day 1 in Bologna
The main square, and the leaning towers
The main square is the size of a football pitch and has a church on it that was meant to be the largest in Christendom. The city started it in 1390, the papacy noticed the ambition and cut off the funds, and the front was never finished: marble for the bottom third, bare brick for the rest. Bologna has left it that way ever since, which tells you something about the place.
Walk east afterwards, under the arcades along the main shopping street, to the pair of brick towers that mark the old crossroads. One is nearly a hundred metres high, the other is half that and leans more than three metres out of true, which is enough to be unsettling from directly underneath.
Then eat. Thursday to Saturday you will need a booking; on a Monday you can walk in anywhere.
- 15:30
Basilica di San Petronio
ReligiousVast, plain and unfinished, with a brass meridian line laid into the floor in 1655 by the astronomer Cassini. Sunlight through a hole in the vault crosses it at noon, and it was accurate enough to help settle the length of the year.
- 17:30
Torre degli Asinelli
ArchitectureBuilt between 1109 and 1119, ninety-seven metres of brick, and closed to climbers since 2023 while its shorter, more alarming neighbour is stabilised. Even from the ground the pair are the strangest skyline in Italy.
- 20:00
Tagliatelle al ragu
EatHave the one dish the city is named for on the first night and get it out of the way. It should be flat pasta, a sauce cooked for hours with more meat than tomato, and no herbs to speak of.
With more time: The fountain of a sea god on the corner of the main square, cast in 1563 and scandalous at the time for reasons that are obvious when you look at it, is where everybody in Bologna arranges to meet.
Day 2 in Bologna
The old university, a scream in terracotta, and a hidden canal
The university had no buildings for its first five hundred years: lectures happened in rented rooms and churches, and students hired their own professors and fined them for turning up late. The papal legate finally put up a single building in 1563, and its walls are covered with the painted coats of arms of thousands of students who passed through.
Upstairs is an anatomy theatre panelled and carved entirely in spruce, with tiers of benches around a marble dissection table and two flayed figures holding up the lecturer's canopy. A bomb destroyed it in 1944; it was rebuilt from the surviving splinters and you cannot tell.
The afternoon is two small things a few minutes apart. One is a sculpture nobody warns you about. The other is a window in a wall that shows you the canal system Bologna spent the twentieth century paving over.
- 09:30
Palazzo dell'Archiginnasio
ArchitectureFree to walk into, with a staircase of heraldry and the wooden anatomy theatre at the top for a small ticket. The old library reading room off the courtyard is still in use, so keep your voice down.
- 12:00
Lunch standing up in the Quadrilatero
EatA plate of mortadella and parmesan at a counter in the market lanes, a glass of something fizzy and red, and back out. Ten euros, twenty minutes, better than most sit-down lunches in Italy.
- 13:30
Santuario di Santa Maria della Vita
ReligiousSeven life-size terracotta figures around a dead Christ, modelled in the 1460s by Niccolo dell'Arca with the mourners caught mid-motion, drapery flying. The two on the right are as raw as anything in Italian sculpture.
- 15:00
Finestrella di Via Piella
OtherA shuttered window in an ordinary street that opens onto a canal running between the backs of the houses. There were once dozens of these waterways powering silk mills; this is the last easy look at one.
With more time: The Santo Stefano complex, five minutes east, is a knot of linked churches, seven of them by tradition and four surviving, built and rebuilt from the fifth century onwards around a courtyard, and it is the most atmospheric corner of the old city.
Day 3 in Bologna
Ravenna, and the mosaics
An hour and a bit east by train is a quiet provincial town that was the capital of the western Roman Empire, then of the Ostrogothic kingdom, then of Byzantine Italy, and it kept the decoration from all three. Nothing else in western Europe has mosaics like these, and nothing else has them intact.
The three sites are within fifteen minutes of each other on foot and one combined ticket covers them all. Go for the small one first if you can: it is the oldest, the most fragile and the most extraordinary, and there is a time limit inside when it is busy.
It is a full day but not a rushed one. Ravenna is small, flat and full of bicycles, and the middle of the day is best spent eating rather than looking at ceilings.
- 10:00
Mausoleo di Galla Placidia
HistoricA small brick cross of a building with a vault of deep blue scattered with gold stars, and Roman-era mosaic work below it. Five minutes inside is enough and you will remember it for years.
- 11:15
Basilica di San Vitale
ReligiousConsecrated in 547 and octagonal rather than cross-shaped, with the emperor Justinian and the empress Theodora facing each other across the apse in court dress, carrying offerings, made of glass and gold and looking straight at you.
- 13:00
Lunch in Ravenna
EatRomagna cooking is a notch simpler than Bologna's and comes with piadina, a flatbread cooked on a griddle and folded around cheese and greens. The covered market north of the main square does it cheaply.
- 14:30
Basilica di Sant' Apollinare Nuovo
VisitA long sixth century basilica with two processions running the length of the nave above the columns: martyrs on one side, virgins on the other, all in gold, and a few Gothic figures hastily erased when the theology changed.
With more time: Dante is buried in Ravenna, in a small domed tomb beside a church with a permanently flooded crypt: he died here in exile from Florence, which has been asking for him back for seven hundred years. Both stand a couple of streets off the centre and cost nothing to visit.
Day 4 in Bologna
Pictures, and a last plate of pasta
The last morning is for the city's picture gallery, at the far end of the university quarter and about fifteen minutes on foot from anywhere central. It is a regional collection rather than a national one, which means Bolognese and Emilian painters most people have not heard of, hung with room to breathe and almost nobody in the rooms.
Then a final lunch, and an easy walk back to the platforms under the arches.
- 09:30
Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna
CultureGiotto at one end, the Carracci and Guido Reni at the other, and Raphael's Saint Cecilia in the middle. Ninety minutes covers it comfortably.
- 12:00
Tortellini in brodo, then the train
EatTiny stuffed pasta in a clear capon broth, which is what people here actually eat at Christmas and what they will tell you about at length. Then walk to the platform.
With more time: If you would rather walk than look at paintings, the portico to the sanctuary on the hill runs for nearly four kilometres and six hundred and sixty-six arches, uphill all the way, and ends with the whole plain laid out behind you. Allow two hours there and back, or take the little tourist train up and walk down.
Before you go
Where to stay
Almost anywhere inside the old ring road works, because the centre is compact and covered. The blocks between the main square and the two towers put you in the middle of the eating and the noise; the university quarter to the north east is younger, louder and cheaper; the streets west towards the Pinacoteca are quiet.
The station is ten minutes from the main square along a covered arcade, so arriving with a bag is easy and nobody needs to stay next to it.
Getting around
On foot, under cover. The historic centre is about a kilometre and a half across and largely closed to cars, and the arcades mean weather is close to irrelevant.
Bologna sits on the main line between Milan, Florence and the Adriatic, which makes it one of the best-connected cities in the country: Florence is thirty-seven minutes by fast train, Milan an hour, Venice an hour and a half. That is what makes the day trip below sensible and also what makes Bologna a good base for a longer trip.
Booking, and what is closed
Very little needs booking here, which is part of the pleasure. The exceptions are restaurants, which fill up with locals from Thursday to Saturday, and the tall tower, which engineers shut in 2023 while they stabilise its leaning neighbour. Check before you plan a morning around it.
Ravenna's monuments run on a combined ticket covering several sites, with a small separate supplement for the mausoleum in high season and a timed slot inside it. Buy it at the first site you reach.
Eating
The local dish is tagliatelle with a slow-cooked meat ragu, and the reason nobody here serves spaghetti bolognese is that the sauce needs a flat porous noodle to cling to. Round pasta is the wrong tool. Order it once, then move on to tortellini floated in capon broth, which is the winter dish people get sentimental about.
The Quadrilatero, the grid of lanes just east of the main square, has been the market since the Middle Ages and still sells mortadella, parmesan, fresh pasta and fish from the same doorways. It is the best lunch in the city: buy a plate of cold cuts standing up, add a glass of Lambrusco, and skip the restaurant entirely.
Nobody comes back from Bologna talking about a building. They talk about a market stall, a two-hour lunch that cost less than a museum ticket somewhere else, and the fact that it rained all afternoon and it did not matter.
Book the restaurants, walk under the arches, and let the rest of it happen.
Or make it a longer trip
These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is Bologna worth four days?
- Comfortably, if one of them is a day trip. The historic centre is small and you could see the main sights in a long weekend, but Bologna is a place to be in rather than a place to tick off, and it is the best-connected base in northern Italy for days out.
- Can I climb the towers?
- Not at the moment. The taller one has been shut since 2023 while its leaning neighbour is stabilised, and there is no announced reopening. The hill sanctuary south of the centre gives you the city from above instead, and so does the monastery terrace on the ridge below it.
- Is Ravenna better as a day trip or a night?
- A day trip works: it is about an hour and twenty by train and the monuments are close together. A night is nicer if you want the mosaics early, before the coaches, and it puts the sixth century basilica out in the fields within reach.
- Is it better than Florence?
- Different rather than better. Florence has the art, Bologna has the life. If you have already done the Renaissance circuit and found it crowded, Bologna is the obvious correction: the same region, a fraction of the visitors, and much better food.
- When should I come?
- Autumn, for the food. September to November is when the new oil, the truffles and the mushrooms arrive and the students are back. Summer is humid and the city half empties in August. Winter is cold, foggy and the tortellini season, which is a fair trade.