Italy · Old Town
Bologna
A self-guided walking tour of the Bologna Old Town, every street in two days.
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Bologna is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
At a glance
Plan your walk.
- Distance
- 38.7 km
- Time
- about 11 hours
- Streets
- 168
- Steps
- 1 street with steps
- Start point
- Asinelli
- Phone needed while walking
- no
- Works offline
- yes
- Expires
- never
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Asinelli 1,500 points
This is how you work out where you are. From half the lanes on this level you can see it over the roofs, and every road east of the centre aims at its foot. Get to the bottom of it and look at the shorter one beside it. Then decide how long you want to stand just there.
Piazza Maggiore 500 points
The whole level leans towards this one. When you are done with it, walk into the vaulted crossing under the Palazzo del Podestà on the north side, put your face into one of the four corners and speak quietly. Whoever is standing in the corner diagonally opposite will hear every word. Six hundred years on and that trick still works.
Santa Maria dei Servi 500 points
The eastern rim of the level, and the reason it reaches out that far at all. In front of the doors sits a court of arches closed on all four sides, wide enough to count as a room of its own, and it is the widest one in a town that is mostly arches. Walk the four sides before you go in.
Teatro Arena del Sole 500 points
You will pass it twice on the long dead straight street north and think about something else both times. Do not. Stop under the three big arches and read the line carved above them. Five Italian words, and they say what this building is for. I am not translating them.
Torre degli Azzoguidi 500 points
The lane took its name from it, not the other way round, which is the correct order of things. Altabella, which means tall and beautiful, and nobody was exaggerating. It is private, so you stay outside. Get far enough back that you can see the whole of it against the sky.
Biblioteca Universitaria 250 points
From the lane it is one more door in a row of them, and that is the whole point. Everything worth looking at is on the far side, and the loudest stretch of the whole walk runs past outside. Go in if they let you. Then put your head back.
Mercato delle Erbe 250 points
The one building here where I am comprehensively outclassed. Come in the morning, before the counters thin out, and take the outer aisle rather than the one straight up the middle. Nobody in here is in a rush, which I respect.
Palazzo Albergati 250 points
The south-western corner, and further from everything else on this map than anywhere you will go. The facade is so wide you will pass it thinking it is three houses in a row. It is one. Three houses wide, one way in. That is not a building. That is a main course.
Porta San Felice 250 points
The furthest west you get. From the heart of the level out to here is one dead straight line, drawn a very long time ago and never once bent. Do the whole of it in one go. At the far end the traffic swings around this thing on both sides, and it does not appear to have noticed.
Torresotto di Porta Nuova 250 points
Low, plain and very easy to miss, which is exactly why I am pointing at it. Slow down when the buildings pinch in over the road, look at the arch above your head, and then turn and look back the way you arrived. That is the shape of a boundary nobody has needed for six hundred years.
Eating
Actual food.
Bologna carries three nicknames and the middle one is the fat one. Nobody here takes that badly. The food stands on two legs: a sheet of egg pasta rolled out by hand, and the pork of the hills at the city's back. Everything after that is an argument about millimetres, and the arguments here go to a notary. This town lodges its recipes with the chamber of commerce. I have been lying about for six hundred years and I have never seen a place take dinner this seriously.
Meat and fish
Tagliatelle al ragù
Eight millimetres wide once cooked, and that is not an opinion. A sample in gold has sat in a case at the chamber of commerce since 1972, and somebody worked out that it comes to one twelve thousand two hundred and seventieth of the tower you keep seeing over the roofs. The sauce beside it got its own deposit in 1982 and a rewrite in 2023. A town that measures dinner against a tower. I measure mine in streets.
Sources: Prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali dell'Emilia-Romagna, Biblioteca Salaborsa (Comune di Bologna), Camera di Commercio di Bologna
Tortellini in brodo
Pork loin, prosciutto, mortadella, Parmigiano, egg and nutmeg. That filling was fixed on paper in 1974 and it has to rest a full day before anybody folds it. In 2008 they came back and fixed the pastry too, about five grams a piece. Order them in broth. A day of waiting before the work even starts is my kind of schedule.
Sources: Prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali dell'Emilia-Romagna, Biblioteca Salaborsa (Comune di Bologna)
Mortadella Bologna
Pork pounded fine with cubes of throat fat, never under fifteen per cent of the slice, cooked slowly in dry air until the cut face turns velvet. A cardinal wrote the production rules in 1661, three centuries before anyone said the words protected designation. Ask for it in sheets thin enough to drape. Abroad they named the imitation after the city, which is the biggest compliment a sandwich can pay a town.
Sources: Regione Emilia-Romagna
Vegetarian
Tortelloni di ricotta, burro e salvia
Bigger and rougher than the tortellini, and on purpose. Ricotta, Parmigiano, parsley, a little garlic and nutmeg inside; melted butter and sage leaves over the top. The meatless version has a deposited recipe of its own, filed in 2006 as tortelloni della Vigilia, for the days when meat was off the table. Eight to twelve on a plate is the standard. I would want twelve.
Sources: Biblioteca Salaborsa (Comune di Bologna), BolognaToday, Il Resto del Carlino
Torta di riso (torta degli addobbi)
Rice cooked soft in milk, then eggs, ground almonds and candied citron, baked flat and cut into diamonds rather than squares. It belongs to the Addobbi, the parish feast a cardinal set up in 1566, when the streets of the parish get hung with drapes from house to house. Each parish takes its turn once every ten years. A cake with a street attached is exactly my sort of cake.
Sources: Bologna Welcome (ente turistico), Storia e Memoria di Bologna (Museo civico del Risorgimento, Comune di Bologna), BolognaToday
Pinza bolognese
A sweet dough folded over a dark fruit filling they call mostarda here. The mountain version of the recipe went to a notary in 2006, and something very close to it is already in a manual on running a household from 1644. It sits on the bakery counter for days and holds up. Anything that survives a week on a shelf has my full attention.
Ask the bakery about the fat in the dough. Some use butter and some do not.
Sources: Prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali dell'Emilia-Romagna, Biblioteca Salaborsa (Comune di Bologna)
Vegan
Two, and it is the kitchen rather than neglect. This city's cooking rests on two things it will not give up: egg in the pasta and pork in the filling. Take both away and what is left came down from the chestnut hills behind the city. That food is real and it is older than any of the recipes above it, but there is not a great deal of it. For a plant day here the market halls are the honest answer, and they are superb.
Mistocchine
Chestnut flour and hot water, nothing else, patted flat and cooked on a hot plate until the flour goes dry. No sugar, because the chestnut brings its own. Women in aprons and white headscarves kept braziers going under the arcades and sold them straight off the street, and the city thought this important enough to set their prices. Two ingredients, a fire and a pavement. I would have queued.
Rare now. Look for it at a market stall in the cold months or up in the hills, not on a restaurant menu, and ask what went into the batter because a modern hand sometimes adds milk.
Sources: Prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali dell'Emilia-Romagna, BolognaToday
Mela Rosa Romana
The apple of the hills at the city's back, small and rosy and grown up there for something like a few thousand years. It is a cooking apple: it goes into jam, into compote, and into the mostarda that fills the pinza. Trees a century old are still standing in the mountain villages, half of them forgotten in somebody's field. An apple that outlived everyone who planted it.
A market and farm-shop thing, and an autumn one. It is not on menus.
Sources: Prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali dell'Emilia-Romagna, Città metropolitana di Bologna
Afternoon coffee
Aroma, Via Porta Nova come for the one thing: the house blends
Via Porta Nova 12b
They opened in 2001 and left the word bar off the sign on purpose, so that nobody would come in expecting a sandwich. Six house blends and a rotating shelf of single origins, weighed and pulled the same careful way every time, by a man who has twice been the national champion at making it by hand. A small wooden room on a side street, and the cup is the entire reason to be in it.
Small, and the counter is where it happens. They publish no hours of their own, so do not build a long walk around it.
Sources: CiboToday/BolognaToday (Citynews), Coffee Insurrection, Dissapore
Dinner
Trattoria da Me, Via San Felice the old one
Via San Felice 50
Somebody has been feeding people at this address since 1937, when two Rusconis opened a neighbourhood osteria here, and the granddaughter runs it now. The pasta is rolled by hand in the next room and sold over the counter as well as cooked. This is the working end of via San Felice, a long way from the towers, and the room is full of people who live here.
Closed Monday. It handles its own bookings and it fills up, so call. There is a second house of the same name up in the Corte de' Galluzzi. This is not that one.
Sources: MICHELIN Guide, Food and Wine Italia, BolognaToday
All'Osteria Bottega where locals go
Via Santa Caterina 51
One small room under the arcades of a side street out in the Saragozza quarter, run by the same oste since the early nineties. The traditional recipes come out straight, with nobody improving them on the way. It is far enough off the middle that you have to mean to go, which is why the tables are full of people who live here.
- Monclosed
- Tue12:30–14:30, 20:00–22:30
- Wed12:30–14:30, 20:00–22:30
- Thu12:30–14:30, 20:00–22:30
- Fri12:30–14:30, 20:00–22:30
- Sat12:30–14:30, 20:00–22:30
- Sunclosed
Closed Monday. Bookings by telephone only, Tuesday to Saturday between eleven and four, and they say the table goes to somebody else fifteen minutes after your time.
Sources: MICHELIN Guide, BolognaToday
Checked 5 September 2026.
Name origin
Why it is called Bologna.
The Etruscans had a town here and called it Felsina. The Romans dropped Bononia on top of it, and Bononia is not a Latin word either: it is Gaulish, from bona, meaning a built thing. So the honest translation of this city's name is The Buildings. Three peoples had a go at naming the place and the one that stuck was a shrug.
Sources: www.treccani.it
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
The hills stop here. Bologna sits on the last slow slope of the Apennines, right where they give up and turn into the flat country, with the ridge between the Reno and the Savena running up to the edge of town. Then in 187 BC a consul drew a road from Rimini to Piacenza straight through the middle of it. The road is still there, still straight, and it still cuts the place into two halves of almost the same size. Everything gets funnelled past a corner like that, and I like a corner where everything comes to me.
Sources: www.treccani.it
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Felsina was here first, and its life is reckoned from the end of the sixth century BC. The date with a number attached to it is the Roman one. In 189 BC three thousand men were settled here as a Latin colony, and the outline they pegged out that year was still the measure of the built-up town seven centuries later. Somebody spent one afternoon with a measuring rod, and the place has been arguing with it ever since.
Sources: www.treccani.it; www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1116–1506
The city ran itself, and then went on running itself while other people held the title. Emperor Henry V handed the Bolognesi a diploma on 15 May 1116, and that single sheet has been treated as the Comune's birth certificate ever since. What follows is four hundred years of the Church claiming the place and local families actually holding it. Taddeo Pepoli had himself proclaimed lord in 1337, and in 1350 the Pepoli sold the whole city to the archbishop of Milan. Somebody sold a city. I think about that more than is healthy. In 1376 the people took the government back and put the word Libertas on a blue shield, where it still is.
Sources: archivio-notizie.comune.bologna.it; www.treccani.it; www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it
- 1506–1796
The Church, in person. Pope Julius II made his triumphal entry into the city in 1506, and the government was rebuilt around him: a Senate of Forty in place of the old Reformers, with a cardinal legate above the lot of them. Two hundred and ninety years of that arrangement. It is the longest anything here has ever stayed the same, and I am the local authority on things staying the same.
Sources: www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it; www.treccani.it
- 1796–1815
France. Bonaparte came down into Italy in 1796, and in a night session between 27 and 28 December that year a hundred and ten deputies from Bologna, Ferrara, Modena and Reggio voted a Cispadane Republic into being, one and indivisible. A committee of eight was told to write the constitution. Things decided in the middle of the night rarely make it to breakfast. This one nearly did.
Sources: www.treccani.it; www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it
- 1815–1859
The Church again. On 18 July 1815 the Austrian governor read out a proclamation, left, and handed the city over to a provisional papal administration under Monsignor Giacomo Giustiniani. Fifteen days of celebration were declared, with lights along the streets and the bishops' busts lit up in the windows. I was underfoot for all fifteen, and I can tell you the lights were the best part of it.
Sources: www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it; www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it
- 1859–
Italy. On 12 June 1859 the papal banner came off the main door of the government palace, the last cardinal legate left, and the first act of the provisional council was a telegram to Cavour submitting the city to Victor Emmanuel II. The vote came the following March: in this province 76,276 ballots out of 76,500 were for joining the Kingdom of Sardinia. That is the least disagreement I have ever heard in a town that argues about lunch.
Sources: www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it; www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it
The emblem
What the shield means.
Bologna's real arms are an oval shield in four quarters: two of them a red cross on silver under an Angevin chief, two of them the word LIBERTAS written in gold across a blue field, and a lion's head sitting over the whole arrangement. Splendid on a banner and unreadable at the size of a thumbnail. So the icon is the other sign this city puts on everything it owns: the pair of towers at the eastern end of the old centre, one of them dead upright, the other visibly out of true. Say Bologna anywhere and that is the shape people see.
Sources: it.wikipedia.org; www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it; www.bolognawelcome.com
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
Sixty-two kilometres of arcade, forty-two of them inside the old centre, and you can cross most of this level without once being rained on. It began as cheating. Private houses were pushed out over public ground to gain a room, first on wooden brackets, then on posts from below because the brackets were giving way. In 1288 the city gave up fighting it and made the arcade compulsory instead, at least seven Bolognese feet high, which is 2.66 metres, so that a man on a horse still fitted underneath. They are private property to this day and everybody walks on them anyway. UNESCO listed twelve stretches in 2021.
Sources: static.bolognawelcome.com; www.unesco.it; www.esteri.it
The university counts itself from 1088, which by its own reckoning makes it the oldest in the western world. The Archiginnasio, its seat through the Counter-Reformation years, was not built for it until 1563, by Antonio Terribilia. Four hundred and seventy-five years between the two dates. Both of them are on your map: you will walk Via dell'Archiginnasio, and a few lanes away, Via dei Terribilia, named after the man who drew it. I have views about hurry and none of them are favourable.
Sources: www.unibo.it; static.bolognawelcome.com
There is no river. No large watercourse runs through Bologna at all, so from the twelfth century the city went and fetched one: a weir across the Reno out at Casalecchio, a channel in from there, and the water put straight to work. The grain mills stood in a row between Via Capo di Lucca and what is now Via Alessandrini, on nine drops of falling water. All of that is still down there. Between the early 1900s and the years after the war almost every open stretch in the centre was asphalted over, and you will spend a whole day walking on top of it without hearing a thing. There is one window left, in Via Piella, that looks down onto the water.
Sources: www.culturabologna.it; fondoambiente.it; mappa.canalidibologna.it; www.bolognawelcome.com
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Via
- The plain word for a street: a hundred and fourteen of the hundred and eighty on this map. Exactly one outranks it: Strada Maggiore, the great road, which earned the upgrade by being the way east out of town.
- Vicolo
- An alley, and there are eighteen of them here. Vicolo Ranocchi, Vicolo Colombina, Vicolo Tubertini, Vicolo Mandria. Narrow, short, and each one still has dots down the middle of it.
- Galleria
- A passage cut clean through the inside of a block, roofed and counted as a street. Galleria Accursio, Galleria Cavour, Galleria del Toro, Galleria dei Notai. Ten of them, and not one is where you expect a street to be.
- de'
- Bologna's clipped way of writing dei, of the. What follows is almost always a trade or a family: Via de' Pignattari, the potters; Via de' Fusari, the spindle makers; Via de' Coltellini, the cutlers; Via de' Gargiolari, the hemp dealers.
- -erie
- A plural ending that names the shops that once stood in the row. Via Calzolerie, the shoemakers. Via Drapperie, the cloth sellers. Via Pescherie Vecchie, the old fishmongers. Via Caprarie, the goat butchers. Four streets, four smells, all within two minutes of each other.
- Porta
- A gate. Six names on this map carry it, and at several of them there is no longer anything left to walk through. Piazza di Porta Ravegnana, Piazza di Porta San Vitale, Piazza di Porta Maggiore. The square keeps the name after the gate has gone.
The size of it
Walk it in a day: Bologna in numbers.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 168streets
- 1,814dots
- 29.9km of street
- 38.7km on foot
- 11hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.