Photo Pest: Bolognese Leftovers

Although Bologna is a gated city, its richer residents primarily repelled pillagers from towers. Few remain. Duo Tori were built by the Asinelli (the taller) and Garisenda families 70 years apart in the 12th century. I'm not sorry the Asinelli tower was closed for renovation; otherwise I would have been tempted to climb 500 steps to the top for bird's-eye views of the city's well-preserved, walkable historic center.

I passed a gate en route to my hotel from Bologna's confusing train station which has accurately been compared it to Dante's nine circles of Hell. Oddly, Bologna was the only city I didn't encounter his scowling image although the poet shouts out the Garisenda tower in the Divine Comedy. .

Porta Galliera, Piazza XX Settembre

Valentina, a Taste of Bologna tour guide, claimed that the Garisenda tower leans more than the one in Pisa. She's right, by a single degree.

Heavy brass keys must be a thing in Italy's three-star accomodations. My cramped room with scuffed walls at the Hotel Atlantic had a three-step marble staircase but no chair and a rack too small for my regulation-size luggage. Still, had the proprietors not demanded 40 euros to return an expensive souvenir t-shirt from Lisbon, I might have pulled my punches in an online review.

Bologna is a great place to tour on foot for two reasons 1) the historic center is reasonably compact; and 2) extensive porticoes shield people from the weather.

They also make great places to hang your wet umbrellas outside.

This bulldog took advantage of a portico on a drizzly morning.

The University of Bologna prides itself on being Europe's oldest university in continuous operation and they've got the professors to prove it. Glossatori, or legal scholars, were the continent's first higher learning educators. They're buried in above-ground tombs near the original site of the university. Its doors opened to students in the late 12th century, about a decade before England's University of Oxford, and a century before Portugal's University of Coimbra.

The performing arts scene in Bologna goes way back, too. I regret missing out on that aspect of Italian culture completely during my two weeks of travel.

Teatro Arena del Sole

Teatro Comunale di Bologna

Italy's political history is complicated to say the least, with lots of independent city states (some under rule by other countries or the Vatican) that eventually united into a single kingdom for the last time under the rule of Victor Emmanuel II in 1861. Three statues in Bologna pay homage to other individuals involved in the struggle:

Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian general and revolutionary who was born in Nice when it was under Italian rule, fought for independence and unification;

Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882)

Marco Minghetti, an economist who was born when Bologna was still a papal state, served twice as Italy's prime minister;

. . . and Ugo Bassi, a Catholic priest, whose support for Garibaldi and unification cost him his life when the once liberal Pope Pius IX repudiated the Italian nationalist movement. A papal governor betrayed Bassi, setting in motion a chain of events that ended with his execution by firing squad in Bologna a decade before the Kingdom of Italy was established.

Ugo Bassi (1801-1849)

Less controversial, Luigi Galvani is a scientist best remembered for making a dead frog's leg twitch using an electrical charge; his name gives the verb "galvanize" to the English language and Mary Shelley cited his research in writing Frankenstein!