What this site is
Sixteen sights, one page each, and eleven sections on how the city works: arriving at a station whose fastest trains leave from deep underground, a center you walk under arcades, a university older than most countries, a kitchen that gave the world a sauce it gets wrong, and the few things worth booking.
The thesis: Bologna is a city you read by walking it. Its best things are not behind ticket desks — they are the porticoes, the towers hidden in later houses, the market lanes and a canal glimpsed through a window. This guide tries to show you how to see them.
Bologna the city — not the metropolitan city
Note This is a guide to the CITY of Bologna. The wider metropolitan city stretches from Imola to the Apennine ridge, and places there are sometimes sold as "Bologna". Where other cities appear on this site — Ferrara, Modena, Ravenna, Parma, Florence — they appear as day trips, which is what they are.
How it is made
This site is written and maintained with the assistance of AI, edited and fact-checked before publication. That is stated on every page in the footer, not buried here.
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and are credited individually on the page each one appears on, with a link to the original file and its licence.
What it will not tell you
Note No admission price, opening time, fare or fine appears anywhere on this site. Those change, and the operator is the only source that is right on the day you travel.
It does not recommend individual restaurants, shops or hotels. A guide written at a desk cannot tell you which kitchen is good this season.
Corrections
If something here did not match what you found, the contact page says which corrections are most useful.
