A few postings ago, I wrote about running once again because covid-19 shut down our local gyms – but that came to a quick halt in late June, at a doctor’s office visit for my knee. I ended up instead taking brisk walks through my New Jersey suburban neighborhood, a surprisingly pleasant daily routine…. although I’ve had to endure my daughters’ taunts for still using an Apple iPod Nano to carry my tunes.

The scenes in my morning walk in Bologna are certainly radically different – and remarkably beautiful. I leave the apartment and head along the leafy Via Irnerio, cut through Via Antonio Bertoloni to the courtyard at Via Zamboni (part of the University of Bologna’s economics school), and follow that down (through porticoes) to the Asinelli and Garisenda towers seen back in my Nov. 2015 visit.

 

 
Bologna buildings were required to have porticoes when they were built (unless the owner was sufficiently wealthy to pay for an exemption), and that has resulted in a visually beautiful downtown and university area that also provides shelter on rainy or snowy days. The city’s 38 kilometers of porticoes have been tentatively listed for inclusion as a World Heritage site by UNESCO, and the city hopes they will receive full recognition in 2021.

 

 

Another set of porticoes along the main Via Rizzoli takes me to the Torre Lambertini and the well-known Fountain of Neptune adjacent to the main Piazza Maggiore. Then it’s a right turn onto Via dell’Indipendenza, past the statue of Garibaldi, to the Piazza dell’Otto Agosto. The piazza hosts a lively street bazaar on weekends, where a wide range of clothing, books, food and virtually any other goods can be found in open-air stalls. Things are busy, even before 8 a.m.

 

 

At the plaza, I turn back onto the apartment’s Via Irnerio once again. In my recent reading of Tom Holland’s Dominion (noted in posting below) I found out that Irnerius, the namesake for the apartment’s street, was the key figure in the recovery of Roman law taught in the University of Bologna’s Law School. Founded in 1088, the University is considered the oldest university in the world (older even than Oxford), and it has more than 80,000 students – giving our neighborhood an exceedingly young feel. Its law school was particularly renowned. Holland notes:

[Irnerius’s] commentaries on a vast corpus of Roman legal rulings, discovered only a few years previously mouldering in an ancient library, had made accessible…. an entire system of law with ambitions to cover every aspect of human existence. ….they were as applicable in the present as they had been back in the days of the Caesars.

The result was much like Bologna today:

The enthusiasm for his researches, and for the great field of study that they opened up, proved immense. Enterprising young men [Note: just men back then!] began flocking to Bologna.