Bologna Culture

La dotta, la grassa, la rossa, la turrita

Italians know Bologna by four nicknames, and the fastest honest description of the city is simply to take them seriously. La dotta, the learned, for the university founded in 1088. La grassa, the fat, for the food. La rossa, the red, for the brick and for the politics. La turrita, the towered, for the medieval skyline of which roughly two dozen towers survive out of something like a hundred and eighty.

A student city, and that is the main fact

The university is not a heritage attraction here. It is the dominant institution, and it determines the city's temperature. Term time fills the porticoes of the Zamboni quarter, sustains a nightlife and a bookshop culture out of all proportion to a population of 391,000, and keeps everyday prices honest. The summer break empties it noticeably, which is why August is both the cheapest and the least representative month.

It also explains the politics. Bologna has a long tradition of the organised left, rooted in the partisan war and sustained by a young, mobile population, and the city is argumentative in a way visitors either enjoy or find surprising in a provincial capital.

The most serious food city in Italy

This is a claim most Italians will concede, and the repertoire is regional and specific rather than national.

• Tagliatelle al ragù — the original of what the world calls bolognese, and unrecognisable next to the export version.
• Tortellini in brodo — small filled pasta served in capon broth, the festive dish, and a subject of genuine local doctrine about size, filling and shape.
• Lasagne alla bolognese — built on green spinach pasta here.
• Mortadella di Bologna — the city's own cured pork, protected by origin, and nothing like what the name became abroad.

The Quadrilatero, the dense grid of lanes behind Piazza Maggiore, is where this is traded rather than displayed: butchers, fishmongers, cheesemongers and fresh-pasta shops on the site of the medieval market. Emilia-Romagna's wider larder — Parmigiano, prosciutto, balsamic — comes from the towns a short train ride away, and the regional products are protected by origin in a way that makes the provenance real rather than marketing.

Music, theatre and the arcades

Bologna is a UNESCO City of Music and the Teatro Comunale is its opera house, but the city's musical reputation is as much about the contemporary scene the students sustain. The porticoes matter culturally as well as architecturally: they make the street usable in all weather, which is why so much of Bologna's social life happens on it.