Explorer Bologne

Piazza Maggiore is Bologna's main square and has been the centre of the city since the Middle Ages. It is framed by the Basilica of San Petronio, the Palazzo d'Accursio town hall, the Palazzo del Podestà, the Palazzo dei Notai and the Palazzo dei Banchi, and opens onto Piazza del Nettuno with its fountain.

Palazzo d'Accursio is Bologna's town hall, on the west side of Piazza Maggiore. It grew from the house of the jurist Accursius and became the seat of the city's government in 1336; Fioravante Fioravanti added its clock tower in the 15th century, and a bronze statue of Pope Gregory XIII from 1580 stands above the portal.

The Fountain of Neptune stands in Piazza del Nettuno beside Piazza Maggiore. Designed by the architect Tommaso Laureti from 1563, it is crowned by a bronze Neptune by Giambologna completed around 1566, above four Nereids and cherubs holding dolphins; the trident in the Maserati emblem is based on it.

The Basilica of San Petronio dominates Piazza Maggiore and is dedicated to Saint Petronius, Bologna's fifth-century bishop and patron saint. Begun in 1390 under the architect Antonio di Vincenzo, it is 132 metres long; its façade remains unfinished above a marble lower band with a central portal carved by Jacopo della Quercia.

The Archiginnasio was built in 1562–1563 to designs by Antonio Morandi, known as Terribilia, to give Bologna's university a single seat. Behind a 30-arch portico, its courtyard, loggias and stairways are covered with thousands of students' coats of arms. Visitors see the wooden Anatomical Theatre of 1637 and the Stabat Mater hall; the rest is the city library.

The Basilica of Santo Stefano, known locally as the Sette Chiese (Seven Churches), is a complex of linked churches on Piazza Santo Stefano. Tradition says Bishop Petronius founded it in the 5th century in imitation of Jerusalem's Holy Sepulchre; it includes the octagonal Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the 13th-century Courtyard of Pilate.

The Basilica of San Domenico holds the tomb of Saint Dominic, founder of the Dominican order, who died here in 1221. Consecrated in 1251 and remodelled in Baroque style in 1728–1732, it keeps his marble shrine, the Arca di San Domenico, begun by Nicola Pisano's workshop and later given figures by Niccolò dell'Arca and the young Michelangelo.

The Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna is the city's national picture gallery, housed in the former Jesuit novitiate of Sant'Ignazio on Via delle Belle Arti, in the same building as the Academy of Fine Arts. It shows Emilian painting from the 13th to the 18th century, including Raphael's Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia and works by the Carracci and Guido Reni.

The Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca stands on the wooded Colle della Guardia, about 300 metres above the city plain southwest of the centre. The present church was built from 1723 to designs by Carlo Francesco Dotti to house an icon of the Virgin, and a 3.8-kilometre portico of 666 arches climbs to it from Porta Saragozza.