Bologna chartered Europe's first university in 1088 and kept the receipts: 7,000 student coats of arms in the Archiginnasio, a 5th-century copy of the Holy Sepulchre, and a station clock frozen at 10:25 since 1980.
Seven linked churches stacked on a Roman temple to Isis, whose columns still hold up the nave. The Basilica del Sepolcro is a 5th-century copy of Jerusalem's Holy Sepulchre; the Cortile di Pilato holds an 8th-century Lombard basin.
Inside the 15th-century Palazzo Ghisilardi-Fava, built over the Torresotto di Porta Nuova. Its treasure is the set of carved tomb slabs showing Bologna's law professors mid-lecture, students dozing in the front row. Tue-Sun 10:00-18:30.
The university's 1563 seat, its staircases and halls plastered with roughly 7,000 painted coats of arms of students who studied here. The 1637 anatomical theatre is carved entirely in spruce, with the skinless spellati statues holding up the canopy.
A 60-metre tower raised around 1100 by the Prendiparte family, later used as an archbishop's prison — 17th-century inmates scratched prayers and dates into the cell plaster, still legible. Roughly 170 steps lead to the terrace.
Christian Boltanski hung the reassembled wreck of DC-9 flight IH870 — lost near Ustica on 27 June 1980 with 81 people aboard — in a hangar ringed by 81 pulsing lamps and 81 whispered sentences. Eighty-one black mirrored boxes line the walls.
The second-class waiting room wall was deliberately left torn open exactly as the bomb of 2 August 1980 left it. Eighty-five names are cut into a stone slab on the platform, and the station clock outside still reads 10:25.
The apartment where poet Giosuè Carducci died in 1907, with his 40,000-volume library intact, doubles as Bologna's Risorgimento museum: Garibaldian red shirts, 1848 barricade relics and papers from the 1859 fall of papal rule.
A long wall of ceramic photographic portraits of the partisans killed fighting for Bologna, liberated on 21 April 1945. The monumental cemetery around it was built inside a Carthusian charterhouse, over the Etruscan necropolis of Felsina found in 1869.
The longest roofed walkway on earth: 3.8km and 666 arches climbing from Porta Saragozza to the 1765 sanctuary. Building began in 1674, funded arch by arch by guilds and families whose names are carved above the columns. UNESCO-listed in 2021.
A shutter cut into a wall on Via Piella opens onto the Canale delle Moline, part of the 60km of canals dug from the 12th century that drove Bologna's silk mills and made the city Europe's silk-throwing capital until the 1600s.
The ghetto imposed in 1556 and cleared in 1593 survives as a knot of alleys — Via dell'Inferno, Via Canonica, Vicolo Mandria — with walled-up doorways and the sockets where the gates swung. The museum traces the community from the 12th century.
Dominic de Guzmán died here in 1221 and lies in the Arca carved by Nicola Pisano, Niccolò dell'Arca and an 18-year-old Michelangelo, who cut the kneeling angel on the right. Mozart sat the counterpoint exams at the organ loft in 1770.