Discover Palazzo Bo

A university palace on the main street, built round an arcaded courtyard whose walls and vaults are covered from floor to ceiling in painted coats of arms — thousands of them, left by students over centuries. Up a stair from it is a small wooden anatomical theatre: a steep funnel of six concentric elliptical galleries, standing room only, built so that students looked almost vertically down onto a dissection table.

The core is a 16th-century courtyard ringed by a double loggia, its walls and ceilings covered with the painted coats of arms of former rectors and students -- thousands of them, applied over centuries, and the most immediately striking thing in the building.

The anatomical theatre of 1594 is a tight elliptical well of six concentric wooden galleries, standing room only, rising almost vertically around a small table. Its steepness is functional: everyone had to see downward onto the same point.

Gio Ponti's 1930s work added the Aula Magna's fittings, staircases and murals in a stripped, confident modern idiom that sits beside the Renaissance fabric without imitating it.