Places to see in Bologna

A hilltop sanctuary reached by the longest covered walkway in the world — nearly four kilometres of portico and six hundred arches, climbing steadily out of the city. The walk is the attraction and takes about an hour up. Views over the Apennines at the top. Buses exist for the way down.

The taller of the two leaning towers, just under a hundred metres, climbed by nearly five hundred wooden steps with no lift and no shortcut. The view over the red roofs is the reward. Numbers are capped and slots timed; the tower has closed for structural work before, so it is worth checking it is open before building a day around it.

Pouring wine since 1465 and serving no food at all — you bring your own from the market stalls in the alleys outside and buy the drink. Long shared tables, cash, and no concession to anything since.

The old seat of Europe's oldest university, its walls and ceilings covered in the painted coats of arms of centuries of students. The anatomical theatre upstairs is carved entirely in spruce, with two skinned figures holding up the canopy. Small, cheap and genuinely singular. Forty minutes.

Not one church but a linked complex of several, built and rebuilt from late antiquity onward around a courtyard — locally called the seven churches, though the count has changed over the centuries. Free, quiet, and the most atmospheric half hour in the city. On a sloping square with cafés along one side.

Enormous, and famously unfinished — the marble facing stops halfway up the front and simply becomes brick. Inside is a meridian line laid into the floor in 1655, still accurate, with a hole in the roof that puts a disc of sun on it at noon. Free, and a much stranger building than it first appears.

The centre of Bologna and the room the whole city passes through — town hall on one side, the unfinished basilica on another, and people sitting on the steps at every hour. Free, open and the natural place to start. The covered market streets run off its eastern corner.

A pasta and bread shop in the Quadrilatero, in the same family since 1868 — fresh tortellini by weight, and the place to assemble what you take into the Osteria del Sole.