4 Days in Bologna:
The Fat City's Table

The first afternoon opened the city in layers, as Bologna should be opened. There was a stop first at the Antica Aguzzeria del Cavallo on Via Drapperie — a hardware and tool shop that has occupied the same address since 1783 and whose interior, dark and dense with hanging implements and ordered disorder, is one of the city's finest unremarked rooms. Then into the centre, past the Biblioteca Salaborsa, Bologna's civic library built inside a palazzo whose glass floors reveal the Roman city directly beneath your feet, which is perhaps the most useful reminder that this place has been layered since before the concept of tourist information was invented.

The Basilica di San Petronio gave scale and gravity — it remains one of the largest churches in the world despite never being finished, which says something about Bologna's ambitions and its relationship with the papacy that historians have been arguing about for centuries. The Museo Civico Archeologico restored depth, and then Piazza Maggiore gathered everything back into civic form: church, palace, square, fountain, and evening public life still moving through spaces that have been performing these duties for five hundred years. The Fontana di Nettuno, bronze and ancient and presiding over the northwest corner of the piazza with the quiet authority of a deity that has seen everything, watched the traveller order their first Aperol spritz at a table they would occupy for longer than planned.

The first meal in a new city always carries more weight than good sense should allow. It must do more than feed; it must close the door on transit. At Osteria Bartolini – Il Mare a Bologna, that is precisely what happened. The restaurant is a deliberate paradox — seafood in one of Italy's most landlocked major cities — and it succeeds because it does not apologise for the contradiction. The fish arrives fresh, the pasta is made in house, and the room has the ease of a place confident in its own strangeness. By the end of dinner, the road had fallen away from the body. The journey had properly begun.

The second day began before the heat with the pilgrimage to Basilica di San Luca — the hilltop sanctuary reached by the world's longest porticoed colonnade, 666 arches ascending 3.8 kilometres from the city to the church above it. This is the right way to begin such a day, because it sets Bologna in relation to its landscape and its faith before the museums and meals begin their claims. From the sanctuary's steps, in the clear September morning, the city revealed itself less as a tourist object and more as a place of continuity — inhabited, devotional, and oddly calm in its own importance. The plain of Emilia-Romagna stretched south in every direction. The Alps were visible to the north. The traveller understood, for the first time, what it means to be the city at the base of the pass.

Back in the centre, the day deepened rather than widened. The Palazzo dell'Archiginnasio is the university's old seat, its walls covered floor to ceiling in coats of arms belonging to students and professors from the fourteenth century onward — a room-sized index of European intellectual life, and at its heart, the anatomical theatre, where the human body was first studied in systematic, documented form. To stand in that tiered wooden room is to feel the exact moment when the modern world decided it would look at things directly rather than accepting inherited descriptions. It is one of the great rooms in Europe and it costs three euros to enter.

Santa Maria della Vita followed — a small church housing the Compianto sul Cristo morto, Niccolò dell'Arca's seven terracotta figures of grief around the dead Christ, figures so kinetic in their anguish that visitors have been involuntarily stepping backward from them for five hundred years. Santo Stefano then: a complex of medieval churches folded inside each other, cloisters and shadow and stone, the oldest foundations Roman. The Museo Civico Medievale converted that inheritance into civic memory — armour, statuary, carved tombs, the material residue of a city that was once among the most powerful in Europe.

Lunch at Mo Mortadella Lab was a recalibration. Mortadella elsewhere is too often treated as ordinary deli meat, tolerated rather than celebrated. In Bologna it recovers its rank. The mortadella roll with pistachio cream is the order — soft bread, the great pink wheel sliced with proper thickness, the pistachio providing richness against the clean fat of the meat. That is one of the true pleasures of Emilia-Romagna: not merely that the food is good, but that it still belongs fully to where it is eaten. The place has not forgotten what it makes.

The afternoon widened the city again: Palazzo d'Accursio for its civic paintings and the view from the upper rooms over Piazza Maggiore; Torre Prendiparte — a private medieval tower whose owner will let you climb it alone, up a sequence of ladders so steep they are nearly vertical, to a rooftop from which the entire city lies out in the October light like a very good argument for being alive. The Museo Ebraico recovered the Jewish history of a city that was, for centuries, one of the most significant centres of Sephardic life in Europe. The Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna then — a collection weighted toward the Bolognese school, Annibale Carracci and Guido Reni and their contemporaries, painters whose work shaped European art for a century and who are, in the museums of other cities, always labelled Italian rather than Bolognese, which would have annoyed them. And finally MAMbo, the modern art museum in the old refrigeration market, which is a better building than most of what it contains but contains several things worth the detour.

Dinner at Sfoglia Rina concluded the day. The pasta here is handmade by women who learned from women who learned from women, and the tagliatelle al ragù arrives as it should: wide ribbons the colour of egg yolk, the sauce slow and dark and unimprovable. Bologna does not separate learning from lunch; it merely expects both to be taken seriously. The traveller understood this now. They had spent fourteen hours taking the city seriously, and the city had repaid them generously.

The third day turned outward. There is a state — small, improbable, perched on a single column of rock rising from the Adriatic coast plain — that has been independent since the year 301 and considers this unremarkable. San Marino is the world's oldest republic, its three towers visible from the coastal motorway twenty kilometres away, its mediveal streets vertiginous and its views of extraordinary reach. The traveller reached it via Bologna Centrale, south to Rimini by rail, and then the Bonelli Bus from Rimini station — ninety minutes in each direction, the bus climbing the final kilometres through hairpin roads above the plain.

San Marino belongs to another register than Bologna: altitude, stone, fortifications, distance. Its shops are full of crossbows and limoncello and tax-free cigarettes, which is not the most dignified commercial offering but at least represents an honest accounting of what a very small state does to remain solvent. The walls are magnificent. The views in every direction are the kind that make the effort of getting there feel like the point rather than a prelude to it. Lunch at Cantina di Bacco — local wine, a plate of mixed regional meats, the satisfaction of eating at altitude on a terrace above an entire country — provided the meal the day required: simple, undemanding, correct.

The return to Bologna in the early evening restored the city through contrast. Bologna, after San Marino, belongs to table height. It belongs to arcades, courtyards, wine, and the human scale of the street. The stop at Basilica San Francesco — Gothic, French in character, its tombs housing the remains of glossators who literally invented modern legal scholarship — provided one last sober note before the evening meal. Then came Al Sangiovese, and with it the sort of dinner that suits return perfectly: grounded, regional, red-wine worthy, and entirely without fuss. The wine was a Sangiovese di Romagna. The pasta was again handmade. The room was full of Bolognesi and the traveller felt, briefly, like one of them.

The last morning in Bologna was designed for departure — which is to say it was designed precisely. Before the onward rail journey the traveller moved through three sites that together make the most graceful possible exit from the city. First, Basilica di San Domenico: the church where St Dominic is buried, and where the young Michelangelo carved three of the marble figures on the Arca di San Domenico before moving on to other commissions and other cities. The church is quiet and serious and worth the morning.

Then Le Due Torri — the Two Towers, the Asinelli and Garisenda, medieval family towers that once numbered nearly two hundred in the city (wealth displayed as height, which is an architectural tradition that continues in different forms to the present day). The Asinelli is climbable: 498 steps, a slight lean, and the finest view in Bologna from the top. The Garisenda is not — it leans too much. It has leaned too much since the fourteenth century. Dante mentioned it in the Inferno. It remains there, leaning, unconcerned.

San Giacomo Maggiore completed the morning: a Gothic church whose interior holds a Bentivoglio chapel of considerable beauty, and whose portico runs along one edge of Piazza Rossini in a manner so composed and certain of itself that leaving it feels like closing the final chapter of a book you had not intended to finish so quickly. By the time the traveller reached the station, Bologna no longer felt like a stop at the beginning of something larger. It felt complete in itself. The train took them south toward Rome, and they left the city behind them with the particular regret that attends a stay that was, finally, one day shorter than it should have been.