Bologna

I arrived in Bologna at dusk, stepping off a regional train from Parma, and by the time I’d walked two blocks I understood something about this city that photographs never capture: it is made for slow movement. The porticos — that system of covered walkways that threads the entire historic centre — slow you down not because they are narrow or crowded, but because they are beautiful in a way that rewards pausing. Stone arches, some dating to the twelfth century, carry the roofline overhead and keep the rain off and the pigeons away, and you walk beneath them as though the city itself has put an arm around your shoulder.

I’d arrived specifically to eat, which felt appropriate for a city nicknamed La Grassa — The Fat One — though that name undersells what Bologna actually does. This is not a city of excess but of precision. The ragù simmered for four hours, not two. The sfoglia rolled thin enough to hold a sheet of newspaper beneath it. The tortellini sealed with a specific fold that a local guild codified in 1974, as if the dimensions of pasta had legal standing. They do, in a way.

On my first morning I walked to the Mercato di Mezzo — the medieval market at the heart of the city — and stood at a counter eating a mortadella sandwich that cost two euros and tasted like nothing I’d had in Rome or Milan or anywhere else. Mortadella here is different: silkier, more aromatic, cut properly thick. A man beside me ordered the same thing and ate it in four bites without looking up from his phone. This is the everyday reality of eating in Bologna — the remarkable delivered as routine. I spent the rest of that morning climbing the Asinelli Tower, two hundred and forty steps of wooden staircase that creak under each foot, emerging at the top to a view of terracotta rooflines and the plains of the Po Valley stretching northwest until they dissolved into haze.

The university is everywhere and invisible simultaneously. Founded in 1088, it is the oldest in Europe, and the students have absorbed so completely into the city’s fabric that you notice their presence mostly in the evening, when Piazza Verdi fills with people sitting on the steps with wine in paper cups, and the bookshops stay open late, and the bars in the university quarter start serving cicchetti at six. There is an energy here that never tips into chaos — Bologna has too much self-possession for that. It is a city that knows exactly what it is.

I ate my best meal on the third evening, at a trattoria that a woman at my guesthouse had described as “not fancy, but correct.” Correct turned out to mean tagliatelle al ragù with pasta the colour of egg yolk, followed by bollito misto with salsa verde, followed by a wedge of Parmigiano so old it had crystallized into something closer to mineral than food. The house Sangiovese was rough and right. The bill was seventeen euros. I went back the next night.

When to go: October and November are ideal — the harvest is over, the heat has lifted, the truffle market appears at Piazza VIII Agosto, and the university is back in session, which means the city is at full life. March and April work well too. Avoid August, when the city quiets and half the trattorias close.