Bologna

People lived here from the 3rd millennium BC, and by the end of the 6th century BC the Etruscans had founded the city of Felsina. Gaulish Boii followed, and in 196 BC the Romans made it the colony of Bononia on the Via Emilia, which still runs straight through the centre. Lombards and then Franks held it after Rome's fall. Around 1088 its teaching of Roman law grew into the university, the first degree-awarding institution of its kind, whose students would include Dante, Petrarch and Copernicus.

As a free commune Bologna joined the Lombard League against Frederick Barbarossa, grew rich on canals that brought barges into the city, and raised up to 180 family towers. In 1249 it captured King Enzo, son of Emperor Frederick II, and held him prisoner in Palazzo Re Enzo until his death. The Black Death halved its population in 1348; the Pepoli, the Visconti and the Bentivoglio ruled in turn until Pope Julius II took the city in 1506, beginning almost three centuries of papal rule. Charles V was crowned emperor here in 1530, and the painters of the Bolognese School made its name in art.

Napoleon arrived in 1796, and in 1860 Bologna voted to join the Kingdom of Italy. An air raid in July 1943 destroyed a significant part of the centre, and partisans fought at Porta Lame in 1944 before resistance forces entered on 21 April 1945. After the war the Communist Party and its successors governed without a break until 1999. On 2 August 1980 a bomb at the central station killed 85 people. The porticoes were listed by UNESCO in 2021, and in October 2023 the leaning Garisenda tower was sealed off amid fears for its stability.

Bologna has four nicknames, and each describes it. La dotta, the learned, refers to the university, whose tens of thousands of students from across Italy and abroad keep the centre young and its nightlife busy. La grassa, the fat, refers to its rich cooking. La rossa, the red, began with the colour of its brick and terracotta buildings and came to mean its left-wing politics and dense network of cooperatives. La turrita, the towered, recalls the medieval towers, of which only a couple of dozen survive out of up to 180.

UNESCO named Bologna a City of Music in 2006. The Teatro Comunale stages opera, the Orchestra Mozart, created in 2004, had Claudio Abbado as music director until his death in 2014, and the city's festivals range from electronic music and film to the Zecchino d'Oro children's song contest. The Cineteca's Il Cinema Ritrovato fills Piazza Maggiore with film-goers in late June. Bolognese dialect still has a stage of its own, in theatres that play in it.

Unusually for Italy, basketball is the most followed sport, and the city calls itself Basket City for its two rival clubs, Virtus, one of Europe's most successful, and Fortitudo. Bologna FC, seven times Italian champions, won the Coppa Italia in 2025. Every year since 1433 the icon of the Madonna di San Luca has been carried down from its hilltop sanctuary to the cathedral, and the anniversary of the 1980 station bombing is marked each 2 August with a concert in the main square.

About 390,000 people live in the city, and more than a million in its metropolitan area; about 18 per cent of residents were born abroad, most often in Moldova, Bangladesh, Romania, Pakistan or the Philippines. The population is older than the student crowds suggest: a quarter are over 65. Over 80,000 students were enrolled at the university in 2015, and the Johns Hopkins SAIS centre and other foreign universities have campuses here.

The economy is among the strongest in Italy. Food processing, packaging machinery — the area is called the "packaging valley" — and engines and vehicles, including Ducati and Lamborghini, sit alongside publishing, energy and one of Europe's largest permanent trade-fair grounds. Cooperatives, rooted in 19th-century farmers' and workers' struggles, remain a major employer. The regional government occupies the Fiera district towers designed by Kenzo Tange.

Life is lived under the porticoes, on bicycles and in the aperitivo bars. Students keep the centre lively, and the local authorities often have to deal with the noise and litter of the university quarter's nightlife. Works for the new tramway, under construction since 2023, have disrupted many streets. Matteo Lepore, of the centre-left Democratic Party, has been mayor since 2021.

The city's cooking rests on pork, egg pasta and dairy. Ragù — the original of the sauce known abroad as bolognese — is a slowly cooked sauce of a soffritto of onion, celery and carrot with minced beef and some fatty pork, simmered with white wine, milk and a little tomato. In Bologna it dresses tagliatelle and lasagne, and serving it with spaghetti is considered odd. Tortellini, small rings of egg pasta stuffed with pork loin, prosciutto, mortadella, Parmesan, egg and nutmeg, are served in capon broth.

Mortadella Bologna, which holds protected status, is a large cooked sausage of finely ground cured pork with at least 15 per cent small cubes of hard fat, flavoured with peppercorns and sometimes pistachios. The Quadrilatero, the old market streets east of Piazza Maggiore, is the place to buy it, along with cheese, cured meats and fresh pasta, and the Mercato di Mezzo and Mercato delle Erbe are its historic markets.

Sweets follow the calendar: fave dei morti, coloured almond-paste biscuits for All Saints, jam-filled raviole for Saint Joseph's Day, sfrappole, light fried pastries dusted with sugar, at Carnival, and certosino, a spiced Christmas cake. Torta di riso, made with almonds, rice and amaretto, is eaten all year. The wines poured here include Pignoletto from the hills just outside the city, Lambrusco from around Modena and Sangiovese from Romagna.