The Italy You Come Back For

At some point in traveling, returning to a country you know can be more interesting than adding another to the list.

Italy is a good place to test the theory.

For many travelers, trips to Italy follow a familiar route: Rome, Florence, Venice. Later come Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast, Sicily or Puglia. Bologna tends to come later.

The capital of Emilia-Romagna sits 40 minutes north of Florence by high-speed train. Medieval towers, grand churches, and an enormous central piazza define the city.

A city under cover

What you'll notice right away are the porticoes, covered walkways formed where the upper floors of buildings extend out over the sidewalk on columns. They are everywhere. Bologna was growing in the Middle Ages, and pushing those upper floors over the street added rooms without taking the public space below. By 1288, the city was requiring them. Sixty-two kilometers of porticoes still run through Bologna. UNESCO added 12 stretches of them to the World Heritage List in 2021.

Students are another reason Bologna feels different from the Italian cities travelers know best. The University of Bologna, founded in 1088, is considered the oldest continuously operating university in the Western world, and today it enrolls roughly 97,000 students across its campuses, in a city of about 390,000.

Then there is the food.

Parmigiano-Reggiano, prosciutto di Parma, traditional balsamic vinegar from Modena, and mortadella all come from Emilia-Romagna. Bologna adds tortellini and tagliatelle al ragù, a slow-cooked sauce of meat, vegetables, wine, and a little tomato.

The city takes the last one seriously.

In 1972, the local delegation of the Italian Academy of Cuisine deposited the official dimensions of tagliatelle with Bologna's Chamber of Commerce. Cooked, a tagliatella should measure 8 millimeters across.

To make sure there was no confusion, they cast one in gold.

A decade later, the Academy filed a recipe for ragù alla bolognese in the same office, updated in 2023. The Chamber of Commerce now holds dozens of Bolognese recipes under notarial seal.

None of it has ended the arguments.

The Academy compares a filed recipe to a musical score: the notes may be written down, but the art lies in the performance.

This also explains why spaghetti Bolognese isn't really Bolognese. Here, ragù belongs on tagliatelle.

Bring your own lunch

In an alley off the old market, Osteria del Sole has been pouring wine since 1465 and has never had a kitchen.

The sign above the door says vino. You buy mortadella, cheese and bread from the shops nearby, carry it inside and find a place at one of the long tables. The osteria supplies the wine.

Chiara Spolaore is the third generation of her family behind the bar, and she likes to tell people they don't even wash the glasses with water.

Tourism is growing. In the first half of 2025, international visitors outnumbered Italian visitors to Bologna for the first time.

Plan two things a day. Walk the university quarter, then the market. If you want a morning that ends with a view, one portico runs nearly 2½ miles out of the city and up a hill to the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca, about an hour on foot.

Spend considerably longer at lunch than you planned. Prego.