Italy · Old Town
Bologna
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.
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.
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
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 181streets
- 1,860dots
- 30.6km of street
- 43.2km on foot
- 12.3hours 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.