Bologna Audio Tours

Bologna carries three nicknames and earns all of them. La Dotta, the learned, refers to its university: the University of Bologna, founded in 1088, is the oldest continuously operating university in the Western world, and the city has been a student town for nearly a thousand years, which explains its energy and its tolerance. La Rossa, the red, refers to both the terracotta tile rooftops that give the skyline its warm color and to the city's century-long tradition of left-wing politics, which made it a model of communist municipal governance in the postwar decades. La Grassa, the fat, is a tribute to the kitchen: mortadella, tortellini, tagliatelle al ragu, and the original Bolognese sauce were all developed here, and locals take deep pride in the distinction between their ragu and anything served abroad under the name 'spaghetti bolognese.'

The physical city is a pleasure to walk.

Forty kilometers of porticoes, those covered walkways that run beneath the upper floors of buildings along almost every street in the historic center, mean you can walk from the university quarter to Piazza Maggiore without getting rained on. The porticoes are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Piazza Maggiore itself is one of the grandest central squares in Italy, anchored by the unfinished facade of San Petronio Basilica, a Gothic church begun in 1390 that was intended to be larger than St. Peter's in Rome before the Pope intervened to stop it. Climb the Asinelli Tower, one of the two medieval towers that survived the original hundred-plus that once studded the skyline, and you get a view that makes clear just how dense and intact this old city is.