Bologna

Based on Wikipedia: Bologna

In 1249, the son of the Holy Roman Emperor was captured in battle and dragged to Bologna. His name was Enzo, King of Sardinia, and he would spend the next twenty-two years as the city's most famous prisoner, locked in a palace that still bears his name today. Every attempt to rescue him failed. His father demanded his release and was refused. He outlived all his half-brothers and watched his nephew get executed from behind bars. When he finally died in 1272, the last of the great Hohenstaufen dynasty expired with him in a gilded cage in northern Italy.

This is the kind of city Bologna is. Not content to simply exist, it accumulates stories, tragedies, and firsts with the enthusiasm of a collector who never throws anything away.

The City That Invented University

When we say "oldest university in continuous operation," we usually mean Oxford or Cambridge if we're being Anglo-centric, or perhaps the great madrasas of the Islamic world if we're being more globally minded. But Bologna has them all beat.

The University of Bologna has been teaching students continuously since 1088. To put that in perspective: when the first students gathered to study law in Bologna, the First Crusade hadn't happened yet. William the Conqueror had only been dead for a year. The Norman conquest of England was brand new. The very concept of a "university" as a degree-granting institution of higher learning didn't exist until Bologna invented it.

The university began as a center for studying Roman law, which might sound dry until you realize what this actually meant. In medieval Europe, rediscovering and interpreting Roman legal texts was revolutionary. It provided a framework for organizing society that wasn't purely based on who had the most swords. A scholar named Irnerius, working in Bologna around 1100, essentially kickstarted the systematic study of law in Western Europe.

Dante studied here. So did Boccaccio and Petrarch—three writers who essentially created modern Italian literature. The medical school became particularly famous, attracting students from across Europe who wanted to learn the cutting-edge science of the day.

Layers of Civilization

Bologna sits in a location that humans have found irresistible for about five thousand years. The earliest significant settlements date to around the ninth century BCE, associated with what archaeologists call the Villanovan culture—the people who preceded the Etruscans in northern Italy.

Then came the Etruscans themselves, those mysterious people who dominated central Italy before Rome rose to power. They called the city Felsina and made it a proper urban center by the end of the sixth century BCE. The Etruscans remain one of history's great puzzles—we still can't fully read their language, and much of what we know about them comes from their elaborate tombs.

Around the fourth century BCE, a Celtic tribe called the Boii swept down from the north and took over. The Romans later conquered them in 196 BCE and renamed the place Bonōnia, which eventually softened into Bologna. The Boii, incidentally, gave their name to two other places: Bohemia in Central Europe, and the French region of Bourgogne, which English speakers know as Burgundy.

Different peoples, different names, same strategic location where the Apennine Mountains meet the Po Valley.

The Fall and the Saint

When Rome crumbled, Bologna crumbled with it. The Goths sacked the city repeatedly during the fifth century as the Western Roman Empire wheezed its last breaths. This is when the city's patron saint enters the story.

Bishop Petronius, according to tradition, rebuilt the ruined town and founded the Basilica of Saint Stephen. Whether the ancient chronicles exaggerate his role is debatable—hagiography tends toward enthusiasm—but the people of Bologna still revere him today. His church, Santo Stefano, is actually a complex of several churches built at different times, creating a sort of architectural layer cake of medieval devotion.

In 728, the Lombards captured Bologna. These were Germanic invaders who had taken over much of Italy, and they added a whole new quarter to the city near the Santo Stefano complex. The Italians called it the addizione longobarda—the Lombard addition—and you can still walk through streets that trace back to these eighth-century conquerors.

Charlemagne ended Lombard rule when he invaded Italy at the pope's request in 774. Bologna then became a frontier outpost of the Carolingian Empire, a border town on the edge of what Charlemagne considered civilization.

The Towers and the Canals

Medieval Bologna was a forest of towers. Wealthy families built them as status symbols and defensive fortifications, competing to see who could build highest. At the city's peak, there may have been as many as 180 towers piercing the skyline.

Today, about twenty survive, but the most famous pair—the Two Towers, Asinelli and Garisenda—still dominate the city center. The Asinelli tower rises nearly 100 meters high, while the Garisenda leans at an alarming angle, a medieval engineering failure that happened to be preserved as a monument. Dante mentioned the Garisenda's lean in the Inferno, comparing it to the giant Antaeus bending down.

Less visible today but equally important were the canals. Medieval Bologna had an extensive system of waterways that powered mills and allowed boats to reach the city center. This wasn't Venice—the canals were more industrial than picturesque—but they made Bologna one of the great commercial cities of northern Italy. Some of these waterways survived until the twentieth century, when most were covered over or filled in. If you know where to look, you can still find small windows in the pavement revealing the ancient channels flowing beneath modern streets.

The Free Commune

After the powerful Countess Matilda of Tuscany died in 1115, Bologna seized the moment. The city extracted major concessions from Emperor Henry V, essentially gaining the right to govern itself. When a later emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, tried to revoke these privileges, Bologna joined the Lombard League—an alliance of northern Italian cities that had grown tired of imperial interference.

At the Battle of Legnano in 1176, the League crushed Barbarossa's forces. The Peace of Constance in 1183 confirmed what the battle had won: the Italian communes would effectively govern themselves, paying lip service to imperial authority while running their own affairs.

By 1200, Bologna had grown to about 10,000 people—small by modern standards, but substantial for medieval Europe. The city thrived on commerce and crafts, its location making it a natural hub for trade between northern and central Italy.

And then came King Enzo and his twenty-two years of luxurious captivity.

The Troubles Begin

Freedom, it turned out, was hard to manage. In the late 1200s, Bologna's leading families fell into vicious infighting. The free commune that had defied emperors couldn't stop its own citizens from tearing each other apart. By 1327, the chaos had grown severe enough that the pope sent Cardinal Bertrand du Pouget to take charge.

The people of Bologna eventually threw out the cardinal in a popular uprising, but self-governance proved elusive. Taddeo Pepoli established himself as signore—essentially a dictator, though a local one—in 1334.

Then came the Black Death.

Before the plague arrived in 1348, Bologna had between 40,000 and 50,000 inhabitants. After the plague passed, the city had half that number at most. Europe's deadliest pandemic killed somewhere between a third and half of the continent's population, and Bologna was hit as hard as anywhere.

Conquerors and Cardinals

A weakened Bologna attracted predators. In 1350, Giovanni Visconti, the archbishop of Milan, conquered the city. Milan had become a rising power in northern Italy, and the Visconti family viewed Bologna as a useful acquisition.

The city changed hands repeatedly over the following decades. A renegade Visconti rebelled against his family. Cardinal Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz negotiated Bologna's return to papal control in 1363, though it cost the papacy a massive payoff to the Visconti heirs. In 1376, Bologna revolted again and joined Florence in the War of the Eight Saints—a rebellion against papal taxation that got Florence placed under interdict, meaning no one in the city could receive the sacraments.

The chaos of the Western Schism, when multiple popes claimed legitimacy simultaneously, prevented Rome from keeping a firm grip on Bologna. The city drifted as an oligarchic republic, technically acknowledging papal authority while practically governing itself.

The Bentivoglio Era

In 1401, a man named Giovanni Bentivoglio seized power with Milanese support, then promptly double-crossed Milan by allying with Florence. The Milanese marched on Bologna and killed him the following year. His nephew Hannibal took over in 1442, only to be assassinated in a conspiracy backed by Pope Eugene IV three years later.

Despite this bloody track record, the Bentivoglio family managed to establish a lasting grip on the city. Sante Bentivoglio ruled from 1445 to 1462, followed by Giovanni II, who proved remarkably skilled at survival. He fended off the dangerous Cesare Borgia—the ruthless son of Pope Alexander VI who was carving out his own state in central Italy—for years.

But Giovanni II couldn't last forever. In 1506, Pope Julius II, the warrior pope who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, issued a bull excommunicating the Bentivoglio family and placing Bologna under interdict. When papal troops and French reinforcements marched on the city, Giovanni and his family fled. Julius entered Bologna in triumph on November 10, 1506.

The era of the free commune was over. Papal rule would last nearly three centuries.

Papal Glory, Papal Decline

Historians generally describe the period of papal control from 1506 to 1796 as one of decline for Bologna. But that judgment requires some nuance. The 1500s, at least, saw major developments.

In 1530, Emperor Charles V came to Bologna to be crowned by the pope—the last Holy Roman Emperor to receive this honor. The coronation was a massive event, affirming Bologna's importance as a meeting point between secular and religious power.

The city built the Piazza del Nettuno and the Palazzo dei Banchi in 1564, along with the Archiginnasio, the grand main building of the university. Churches multiplied—by one count, Bologna had ninety-six convents, more than any other Italian city. A distinctive school of painting emerged, the Bolognese School, producing masters like Annibale Carracci, Domenichino, and Guercino whose works now hang in the world's great museums.

The decline came later, and it came hard. A series of plagues between the late 1500s and early 1600s devastated the population. In 1550, Bologna had about 72,000 people. By 1630, after the horrific Italian plague of 1629-1631, the city had lost nearly a third of its population and was down to about 47,000.

The deeper problem was economic. Global trade was shifting toward the Atlantic, and inland Bologna couldn't compete. The silk industry, once a major employer, entered terminal decline. The university lost its international draw as students stopped coming from across Europe—partly because of the Church's increasingly hostile attitude toward intellectual inquiry.

The trial of Galileo in 1633 symbolized the problem. The Church demanded that scientists conform to theological requirements, and scholars who valued their freedom increasingly went elsewhere. Bologna's once-great university became a provincial institution.

A Pope Tries to Help

In the mid-1700s, Pope Benedict XIV, himself a Bolognese, attempted to reverse the city's decline. He reformed taxes, liberalized trade, and relaxed the oppressive censorship system. His efforts to revive the textile industry largely failed, but his other reforms had some success.

It wasn't enough. By 1790, Bologna still had only 72,000 inhabitants—the same number it had two hundred years earlier. The city ranked as the second-largest in the Papal States, but that said more about the stagnation of the Papal States than about Bologna's dynamism.

Papal economic policy didn't help. Heavy customs duties and monopoly concessions to favored manufacturers strangled competition. By the 1840s, the city had become a place of stark inequality: the top ten percent lived off their rents, another twenty percent worked in professions or commerce, and the remaining seventy percent struggled with low-paid, insecure manual labor. The papal census of 1841 counted 10,000 permanent beggars and another 30,000 people living in poverty—out of a total population of 70,000.

Napoleon and After

Napoleon arrived in Bologna on June 19, 1796, and everything changed. He briefly restored the old Senate to power, but only as part of a series of French-controlled puppet states: first the Cispadane Republic, then the Cisalpine Republic, then the Italian Republic, and finally the Kingdom of Italy.

After Napoleon's defeat, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 restored papal rule. But the old order couldn't hold. Uprisings in 1831 nearly succeeded—the rebellious provinces planned to unite as the Province Italiane Unite with Bologna as the capital—but Austrian troops crushed the movement within weeks. More revolts erupted in 1848, and again the Austrians restored papal authority.

Papal rule finally ended in March 1860, in the aftermath of the Second War of Italian Independence. The combined French and Piedmontese armies had expelled the Austrians from most of Italy, and Bologna voted overwhelmingly to join the new Kingdom of Italy.

Revival and Disaster

Unified Italy brought railways and renewal. By 1864, Bologna was connected by rail to both Florence and Naples, positioning it as a crucial junction between north and south. The city's moderate elites, who had supported unification and admired British free trade, saw their vision of open markets vindicated. Bologna gave Italy one of its early prime ministers, Marco Minghetti.

The twentieth century brought new troubles. After World War I, Bologna became a center of socialist agitation during the turbulent period Italians call the Biennio Rosso—the two red years of 1919-1920. The traditional elites, frightened by the prospect of revolution, threw their support behind Benito Mussolini's rising Fascist movement.

Under Fascism, Bologna developed into an important manufacturing center. Food processing, agricultural machinery, metalworking—the industries that would later make the city prosperous got their start in these years, often with heavy state investment. A giant tobacco manufacturing plant opened in 1937.

Then came World War II.

Bologna's strategic importance as an industrial and railway hub made it a prime target for Allied bombing. On July 24, 1943, a massive raid destroyed much of the historic center and killed about 200 people. The railway station and surrounding areas were devastated; 44 percent of buildings in the center were destroyed or severely damaged. Another raid on September 25 killed 2,481 people and injured 2,000 more. By the end of the war, 43 percent of all buildings in Bologna had been destroyed or damaged.

Resistance and Liberation

After Italy's armistice with the Allies in September 1943, Germany occupied the northern half of the country. Bologna became a center of the partisan resistance.

On November 7, 1944, partisans of the 7th Brigade fought a pitched battle against Nazi and Fascist forces at Porta Lame, one of the old city gates. It was one of the largest resistance-led urban battles in the entire European theater. The partisans hoped to trigger a general uprising, but it didn't come—not yet.

Liberation arrived on the morning of April 21, 1945. By then, the Germans had largely withdrawn in the face of the Allied advance, spearheaded by Polish forces. The partisans entered a city that had been occupied, bombed, fought over, and nearly destroyed, but that had never quite surrendered its identity.

The Porticoes and the Music

Modern Bologna is famous for two things that somehow survived all this history: its porticoes and its reputation for food.

The porticoes are covered walkways, columns supporting arched roofs that line the streets of the historic center. Bologna has roughly 40 kilometers of them—enough to walk for hours without ever being exposed to rain or sun. They date from the medieval period, when the city mandated that buildings extend over public space to create covered passages. In 2021, UNESCO recognized them as a World Heritage Site.

The food reputation needs less explanation for anyone who has ever eaten tagliatelle al ragù, tortellini in brodo, or mortadella in its birthplace. Bologna is called la grassa—the fat one—with good reason. The fertile plains of Emilia-Romagna produce some of Italy's finest ingredients, and Bologna has been refining them for centuries.

In 2000, Bologna was named European Capital of Culture. In 2006, UNESCO designated it a "City of Music," recognizing not just its operatic tradition but its thriving contemporary scene. The University of Bologna, nine centuries after its founding, remains one of Europe's leading institutions.

Today, about 390,000 people live in the city proper, with over a million in the metropolitan area. They represent 150 different nationalities. The city has committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2040 and has been integrating gender perspectives into urban planning—focusing on sustainable mobility, public infrastructure, and green spaces.

In 2022, the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore named Bologna the best city in Italy for overall quality of life.

King Enzo would probably not have been surprised. Even as a prisoner, he must have noticed that people in Bologna had a talent for making the best of difficult circumstances—and for building things that last.