Forty Kilometres of Roof

Bologna has sixty-two kilometres of covered walkway. Thirty-eight of those are in the old city, a continuous vaulted arcade running along both sides of nearly every street, built up over eight centuries because the medieval commune allowed households to extend their upper floors over the public road on the condition that they put a roof over the pavement and kept it passable.

The result is that you can walk across a European capital of food, for forty minutes, in a June thunderstorm, and arrive dry. The porticoes are on the UNESCO list, which is a strange fate for what is essentially a very long, very old planning concession.

It changes how you use a city

Shade is the real gift. In late May Bologna sat at 34°C for six straight days and the arcades stayed maybe five degrees cooler, so the entire social life of the city moved under them: tables, students on the steps, market stalls, a man repairing bicycles, three separate accordion players within one block who had clearly negotiated territory.

They also change your sense of scale. Because you are always under a vault, the city arrives in framed increments rather than as a panorama, and you notice paving and doorways and the bottom two metres of buildings in far more detail than the skyline. Bologna is a city best understood from waist height.

The longest portico runs 3.8 km out to the sanctuary of San Luca, up a hill, under 666 arches. I did it at 06:40 on a Sunday and passed nine runners and one nun.

The food, said plainly

Bologna gets described as Italy's food capital and then people list things. Here is what actually mattered:

• Tortellini in brodo, €9 to €14. Not with cream, not with anything. Tiny pasta parcels of pork and mortadella and parmesan in a clear capon broth. It looks like nothing arriving at the table. It is the best thing in the city and it is deliberately, almost aggressively plain.
• Tagliatelle al ragù, €11. What the rest of the world calls bolognese, correctly built: a long, slow, mostly-meat sauce with very little tomato, on egg pasta cut wide enough to hold it. Never on spaghetti. Ask for spaghetti and watch a professional's face.
• Mortadella, €3.50 for a paper cone of it, sliced almost transparent at a counter in the Quadrilatero.
• Friggione, an onion-and-tomato conserve cooked for three hours, served with bread. Peasant food. Unimprovable.

Lunch, standing, at an osteria with six stools and no menu: €9. I ate there five times in eleven days. On the fifth, they brought me the tortellini without asking, which is the closest thing to citizenship a visitor gets.

Two towers, and the one nobody looks at

The Asinelli tower is the famous one — ninety-seven metres, climbable by 498 wooden steps, booked out weeks ahead. Directly beside it, the Garisenda tower leans at four degrees, which is more than Pisa, and is closed, fenced, and currently held together by engineering. Dante mentions it in the Inferno. Almost nobody photographs it, because the fence spoils the shot.

The city once had over a hundred of these things, built by rival families in the twelfth century as a straightforward status contest. Twenty-two survive. Finding them is a good aimless afternoon: look up at junctions and count the square brick stumps embedded in later buildings.

The university changes the price of everything

Bologna has had a university since 1088 and has roughly 90,000 students in a city of 390,000. This is why a glass of Pignoletto is €3, why there are bookshops open at 22:00, and why the walls of the Zamboni quarter are covered in political posters in four languages. It is not a museum city. It is a working one that happens to be very old, which — I am noticing a pattern in what I like.

East next, over the Alps' back door, to the smallest capital city I have ever stayed in.