Bologna historical timeline

Bologna's history is the history of a junction and a university. The site controls the point where the routes over the Apennines meet the Po plain, so it has been fought for since the Etruscans; and the founding of its university in 1088 gave it a second kind of importance that outlasted every political arrangement the city passed through. Communal independence, papal rule, Napoleonic reorganisation and unification all left the university in place, and it is still the institution that defines the city.

Chronology

1. late 6th century B.C. — The Etruscans establish Felsina on the site. It fixes the position rather than the city: the last dry, defensible ground before the hills, on the route between the plain and the passes. Nothing of it stands above ground, but the Archaeological Civic Museum holds its burials and is where the Etruscan city is actually met.
2. 196 B.C. — Rome founds the colony of Bonōnia and runs the Via Emilia through it. The Roman road becomes the city's central axis and stays it: the modern via Rizzoli–via Ugo Bassi line through the centre is the decumanus, which is why Bologna's core is a grid while its outer rings are medieval.
3. 1088 — The university is founded, and becomes the oldest in continuous operation anywhere. It changes what the city is for. Students arrive from across Europe and need housing, which creates the demand that produces the porticoes; and the city acquires a permanent, mobile, argumentative population that it has never lost.
4. 12th–13th centuries — The great age of tower building. Bologna's competing families raise something like a hundred and eighty towers, of which roughly two dozen survive. They were status and defence at once. The Due Torri at Piazza di Porta Ravegnana are what remains of that skyline, and both of them lean.
5. 1183 — The Peace of Constance leaves Bologna with effective autonomy, and it governs itself as a free commune. This is the period that builds the civic centre a visitor walks through — Piazza Maggiore, the communal palaces, the beginnings of San Petronio as a statement of independence rather than a cathedral.
6. 26 May 1249 — At the Battle of Fossalta, Bologna defeats Modena's imperial army and captures King Enzo, son of the Emperor Frederick II. He is held in the city, comfortably, until his death. The Palazzo Re Enzo on Piazza Maggiore is named for that captivity and still carries it.
7. 1390 — Work begins on San Petronio, intended to be larger than St Peter's in Rome. It is never finished, and that is the point: the lower half of the facade is faced in marble and the upper half is bare brick to this day, a permanent record of a civic ambition that outran the city's means and papal patience.
8. 1445 — Bentivoglio rule becomes firmly established, and Bologna spends most of a century under a single family in the manner of other Renaissance Italian states. The period leaves the city its Renaissance palazzi and its painting, and ends abruptly.
9. 10 November 1506 — Pope Julius II enters the city in triumph, and Bologna becomes part of the Papal States. Three centuries of papal government follow. They are conservative and stabilising rather than brilliant: the city stops growing outward, which is a large part of why its medieval centre survived so completely.
10. 19 June 1796 — Napoleon enters Bologna, ending papal rule and reorganising the city's institutions along French lines. Church property is redistributed and the university restructured. Papal government returns after 1815, but the period leaves the city with a sharpened appetite for self-rule.
11. 11–12 March 1860 — Bologna votes to join the new Kingdom of Italy, ending papal rule for good. The city enters a national market with its junction position intact, and the consequences are immediate and physical.
12. 1864 — The railway to Florence opens, the year after the Naples–Rome line. Bologna becomes the hinge of the Italian network, the role it still holds. Everything about the modern city — the scale of Centrale, the industry, the trade fairs — follows from being the place where the lines cross.
13. 24 July 1943 — Allied bombing begins in earnest, aimed at the railway. Raids on 25 September kill 2,481 people. The damage to the city is severe and the marshalling yards are destroyed. Reconstruction is why some streets in the centre mix medieval arcades with post-war infill.
14. 21 April 1945 — Resistance forces enter Bologna and the city is liberated. Bologna's partisan war was among the most organised in Italy, and the memory is not decorative: the political culture that earned the city the nickname la rossa comes directly out of it, and the wall of names at Palazzo d'Accursio is the city's own record.
15. 2 August 1980 — A bomb in the second-class waiting room at Bologna Centrale kills 85 people and wounds around 200, the deadliest attack of Italy's years of political violence. The station clock is kept stopped at the time of the explosion and a plaque lists the dead. Any visitor arriving by train passes the memorial.
16. 2021 — The Porticoes of Bologna are inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site under criterion (iv). It formalises what the city had always known: that 38 kilometres of covered public walkway, built as medieval student housing policy, is the most distinctive thing it has. Two years later the gypsum caves of the Gessi Bolognesi in the hills south-east of the city are inscribed as well, under a natural criterion.