My route from Modena to Bologna may be the shortest stretch of travel I’ve had on this entire trip. Just a quick thirty minute train ride. And since I’ve already passed through the train station here three times in the past week, I may as well explore the whole city. Bologna is a really busy university town, in fact, the university is the oldest university in the world, established in 1088.

Bologna, despite all the idealistic young hipster students walking around, is made up of old world medieval buildings with probably hundreds of miles of porticoes for sidewalks. There are even remnants of medieval canals to check out, lots of hidden courtyards and interesting looking palaces.

Walking the streets I randomly saw this great statue of Hercules hiding in the courtyard of one of the university buildings. I bet there’s hidden stuff like this all over the place.

Arguably, the center of it all is Piazza Maggiore, palaces on three sides and Bologna’s still unfinished cathedral, Basilica di San Petronio. It was started in 1390 and was originally planned to be bigger than St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, but in 1561, Pope Pius IV said nope and blocked further construction. To this day the building is incomplete, the facade is still unfinished, and it’s only the sixth largest church in Europe.

For a Catholic church, there’s a whole lot of science going on in there. One of the chapels has a Foucault pendulum and there’s a super long sundial that stretches almost the entire length of the church. A hole in the ceiling points to the day on the floor every day at noon. Apparently, it’s the sundial responsible for pointing out that the Julian solar calender isn’t worth a damn.

The irregularities of our calendar discovered with the help of this sundial is also why now we have a leap year. Instead of ditching the Julian calendar and adopting the more accurate lunar calendar, they decided to just add a day every four years. They were both brilliant and stupid at the same time.

Also in Piazza Maggiore, although off to the side, is this great Neptune Fountain.

Bologna is famous around the world for spaghetti Bolognese. It’s here in every restaurant, and I’ve eaten a bloody ton of it, but here they call it Ragú and any Bologna native will tell you that they’re two different things. My opinion, who cares, it’s delicious. All of my bolognese eating kept me going through all of Bologna’s awesome museums. Being a giant university town, there’s a lot of them. The Pinacoteca Nazionale was mostly filled with religious art, not usually my thing, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Even better and just down the street was the Museo di Palazzo Poggi. This place had a bit of everything, but it’s primarily a science museum. There’s a lot of medical and anatomy exhibits. Most of it was wax models of every body part there is, but they were super realistic. There was also a lot of taxidermy, animals from all over the world, anthropological artifacts and a huge collection of 16th and 17th century maps.

The funny thing about all these old maps that I noticed is that they all depict California as an island. Ha!

I ended up going to the Museo Medieval because I had some extra time one day. It wasn’t super exciting, but there were some interesting finds in there.

By now I’m well aware that it’s not really an Italian city unless there are some buried ancient ruins underneath a building, a piazza, a metro station, or something. In Bologna the buried ancient ruins are under the public library, Biblioteca Salaborsa. First, the medieval structures, then further down the Roman road, then the Roman sewer, and at the bottom the foundations of a Roman basilica. Roughly 1400 years of history underneath the library. Awesome!

One of the palaces on Piazza Maggiore, Palazzo d’Accursio has a cool art museum of mostly religious art, but included in the ticket was a climb up the clock tower. You know I can’t resist a climb up an old tower for birds eye views, so up I went.

Bologna is or was known as the city of towers. Apparently, there were around a hundred of them in medieval times. Only twenty four still exist, but they’re not hard to find.

These two towers, known collectively as the Twin Towers are the current icons of Bologna. Yes, the little guy has a decisive lean, but we’ll talk more about them later.

Situated at the southeast part of the city is the Complesso delle sette chiese, a complex of what was seven medieval churches, hence the name. There are only four remaining, but they made for an interesting stroll. I really loved the brickwork on the outside.

Next up, Bologna’s gigantic archeology museum. But first, they had a terrific exhibition of frescoes taken from Pompei and Ercolano, which I visited a few weeks ago.

Right next door to the Pompei exhibit is the Museo Archeologico proper. It was pretty thorough and jam packed. I guess being in a university town does have its perks.

This next museum was quite unexpected and different from the usual. Organist Luigi Tagliavini started collecting musical instruments at an early age and now his collection is housed in the restored San Colombano Church. Pianos, organs, harpsichords, and many others dating back as far as the 16th century, and they’re all in working order! They have free concerts pretty frequently too. There were no concerts while I was here unfortunately, but they had a video playing of various musicians playing a lot of the instruments from the collection. I spent a long time in this place. Most of the instruments were beautifully painted inside and out as well, so it was kind of an art museum too. Anyway, the oldest instrument in the collection is a harpsichord made in 1584. Wow!

The harpsichord-piano below combines the mechanisms from a harpsichord and a piano. It was made in 1746 and is the oldest example of a harpsichord-piano in the world!

This next church seems rather ordinary at first glance, but it hides some interesting history inside. The remains of San Domenico, the founder of the Dominican Order, are kept inside in a huge, elaborate chapel. Not the whole thing, but three small pieces of the alter were carved by a young nineteen year old Michelangelo. The churches organ is also famous for having been played several times by Mozart during his time in Bologna.

And now, those twin towers I mentioned earlier. The taller one is Torre degli Asinelli and the shorter is Torre Garisenda. Torre Garisenda looks precarious, but it’s been leaning like that since shortly after it was built in the 14th century, by 4°. The leaning tower of Pisa leans at 3.9°. It’s obviously off limits to visitors. Asinelli Tower right next to it was built in the very early 12th century and also has a less obvious lean of 1.2°. This one you can climb, and that 1.2° weighed about thirty tons on my mind the whole way up and down.

The views from the top were pretty tremendous, if not absolutely terrifying. In fact, this pic I took of Torre Garisenda from the top may be one of the most terrifying pics I’ve ever taken. If you want to do something, do it. If you’re scared, do it scared.

In the pic below, you can see Basilica di San Petronio, Piazza Maggiore, and just to the right of the basilica you can make out the clock tower I climbed the day before which doesn’t seem like a big deal at all from here.

Last but not least, a quick little fifteen minute train ride to nearby Funo to see some more Lamborghinis at the Museo Ferruccio Lamborghini. You didn’t think we were done with the cars, did you?

This museum, however was less about the cars, and more about Ferruccio, his genius, and how it all came to be. He actually got his start making tractors, believe it or not. So there were a lot of tractors at this museum. It’s odd to see the Lamborghini name on farm equipment, but there it is. They also left his office as it was back in the day with all the furniture and everything, seen above.

He even started to design a better helicopter. He was apparently really on to something, but according to the sign at the museum, ‘they’ wouldn’t let him continue his work. No indication of who ‘they’ are though.

The largest part of the museum was filled to the brim with the whole family’s collection of cars. Fiats, Alfa Romeos, Ferraris, Mercedes, a Porche, a 1964 Mustang, a Rolls Royce, a Bentley, and others. Below is the first car Ferruccio modified to race, a Barchetta.

I love the Miura and the Islero, but I think that Urraco is still my favorite.

Ferruccio even made a boat… a really really big boat. It had two Lamborghini twelve cylinder engines in it and set a bunch of records.

After marveling at all that hardware, it was time to make the ultra quick trip back to Bologna where I had just enough time to grab some lunch before getting on another train to my next stop. Ironically, Bologna wasn’t even in my original plan. I added this stop kind of as an after thought. Good thing because I enjoyed Bologna quite a bit. Anyway, my next stop will be a little longer one, but stay tuned for more…