The Archiginnasio of Bologna was at one time the home of the world’s oldest university, and Bologna is still a vibrant university town.
We like Bologna. It has great food, lots of interesting history, and the buzz of being both a wealthy modern city and also a university town. It is also only about three hours away by road from Umbria, so not hard for us to get to. If you are staying anywhere in the Po Valley you will find it easy to get to by car on fast motorways, and it is well-served by high-speed rail services. We’ve met up with friends there a couple of times and enjoyed it very much. I’ve written before about the photographic opportunities Bologna presents in my posts on Street Photography in Bologna and Night Photography in Bologna.
A University Town for Over 930 Years
Not only is Bologna a university town, it has the distinction of being home to the world’s oldest university, founded in 1088. These days the university is based in the Palazzo Poggi, northeast of the centre of town, in a district now full of young people, funky bars and cafes, bookshops, and places that will print and bind your thesis for you.
These days Bologna has a reputation for being both wealthy and left-wing. I read somewhere that the city’s modern politics can be traced back to the centuries of Papal domination, when the combination of suffocating theocratic rule and the intellectual ferment of the university led to a deep-rooted tradition of anticlericalism. The relationship of Italians to the Catholic Church and the implications for their politics are very complicated subjects, and after many years of visiting and several years of part-time residency, all I can say is that it is complicated.
In medieval Italy the term università was applied to any group of people who got together for a common purpose, like a trade guild or a charitable organisation. The correct term for a university in the modern sense was therefore a università degli studi or “university of studies”, a form you still see used in some contexts in Italy.
Most medieval universities did not have anything like colleges and certainly not a separate campus. Students lodged where they could, often in the houses of lecturers, and lectures took place wherever space might be found. Over time that changed, with kings, princes and – in Italy – wealthy churchmen founding colleges. I’m not sure how things had developed in medieval Bologna, but in the 16th Century the centre of town around the Piazza Maggiore was rebuilt to take on the form it has today, with the various palazzi, the Duomo and the Fountain of Neptune. And as part of this, the university was to find a home.
The Archiginnasio
On the southeastern side of the Duomo, the papal legate Carlo Borromeo (later canonised for helping organise the Counter-Reformation) found space in 1562 for construction of a single building to house both elements of the university – the schools of civil and canon law, and the schools of the “arts” – philosophy, medicine, mathematics, music and so on. This building was called the archiginnasio, or “arch-gymnasium”. In that era the Greek-derived term “gymnasium” was often used to describe a secondary school. I am guessing therefore that a place for tertiary education could therefore be called an “arch-gymnasium”.
The façade, with a long neoclassical colonnade, runs alongside the Duomo and Piazza Galvani. These days the colonnade hosts a few swanky cafes – the sort with uniformed waiters – and some expensive-looking shops.
The Coats of Arms
Going through the entrance, you enter the central courtyard, and immediately notice that every surface on the walls and ceilings is covered with coats of arms. Each coat of arms carries, in Latinised form, the name of a country (or duchy, principality or whatever), someone’s name, and a placename. Sometimes the placename is a city, sometimes a country.
What’s going on? Well it seems that the students, who came from all over Italy and Europe, organised themselves into societies based on where they came from, called “nations”, and elected one of their number to represent them. These society presidents had the honour of having their coats of arms fixed to a wall or ceiling, with an inscription about which “nation” they represented, their name, and where they came from. In the picture above, examples include the “nations” of Aragon, Hungary, Switzerland (Helvetiae), Flanders and Portugal. Some are cities like Piacenza (Placentinoria) or Siena (Senesium).
There are a couple of surprises there. Sardinia and Cyprus? That is explained by the fact that the titular crown of Cyprus maintained its own theoretical existence long after the place itself had fallen to the Ottomans, passing from one European royal family to another and ending up with the house of Savoy, which ruled Sardinia. Its representative is described as Sardus Calaritanus, ie. a Sardinian from Cagliari. However Savoy itself (Sabaudorum) being only a duchy, was separately represented.
You can also see that the representatives of the “nations” are not always described as having come from there. So the representatives of England (Anglorum) and Burgundy are described as Mediolanensis which means “from Milan”. And the representatives of Denmark, Switzerland and Flanders are all described as Alemanus which I initially assumed meant “German”, but I then discovered that it could be used to refer to anyone from the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire.
Someone has gone to the trouble of digitising every single one of these, and made them into a searchable database, which you can find here. So if you think you have an ancestor who studied here in the 16th or 17th Centuries, you can search for him here using a Latinised version of his name. Or you can search for everyone from Belgium, for example.
An additional wrinkle – which may explain some of the discrepancies between the “nation” and the provenance of the president – is that at this time several of the territories mentioned were by now Protestant, and, during the Thirty Years War, engaged in active hostilities with the Catholic powers. On how this might have affected the students in Bologna, the sources I have consulted are silent. But it is intriguing nonetheless: what stories lie behind these little memorials? How did an Englishman named Joannes Marinus (John the Mariner?) find his way to Bologna via Milan? What was he studying?
The Library and the “Stabat Mater” Room
One is hardly surprised to find that a university has a library, but in fact this one only dates from 1801, and moreover the impetus for its foundation was because they needed somewhere to store the books from the religious institutions suppressed during the period of Napoleonic government in Italy.
Now it is a public library, which any resident of Bologna can use. But as well as borrowing the latest Dan Brown paperback, they can also access five hundred year old editions, which is pretty cool.
Part of the library is a large room which today is known as the “Stabat Mater” Room because it was here that Rossini’s setting of Stabat Mater Dolorosa had its first Italian performance in 1842, conducted by Donizetti. The text is a 13th-Century religious poem by the Umbrian Franciscan friar and poet Jacopone da Todi. Interestingly, before he took on his spiritual calling, Jacopone had been a lawyer who took his degree here at Bologna. It would be nice to think that had something to do with the choice of venue, but it probably did not.
The Anatomy Theatre
One of the “arts” taught at the university was medicine. The Catholic Church had long banned the dissection of cadavers in order to study anatomy, so pioneers like Leonardo da Vinci had to be a bit circumspect about it. However over the course of the 16th Century it became generally recognised that dissection was necessary to the proper understanding of the human body, and universities built special lecture theatres for the purpose. Rembrandt’s famous The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, showing such a dissection, dates from 1632 (the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons, which commissioned the painting, only allowed one public dissection a year, and the corpse had to be that of an executed criminal).
Bologna’s anatomy theatre dates from 1637, but of the original only the ceiling survives – what we see today mostly dates from the 1730s. In the centre of the room is a marble slab for the cadaver, while at the end of the room is a high desk for the lecturer – from which we can deduce that he had an assistant to do the actual messy stuff.
The walls and ceiling are all of elaborately-carved wood. Allegorical and zodiacal themes represent medicine and anatomy, and two rows of statues and busts around the walls represent the great physicians of antiquity (Hippocrates, Galen and so on) and famous doctors and anatomists of the Renaissance.
The most memorable statues are the two spellati (skinned ones), either side of the lecturer’s desk, and holding up the wooden canopy. These anatomically accurate (I assume; I’m not an expert) figures show the muscles underneath the skin. Although they are wooden carvings, they are the work of a craftsman who was expert in the preparation of anatomical models made of wax for teaching purposes.
On top of the canopy is a female figure representing the art of anatomy, and in a sort of anatomists’ joke, a cherub is offering her, not a flower as such scenes would normally show, but a human femur. Those anatomists must have been a bundle of laughs.
Disaster struck on 29 January 1944, when Allied bombs destroyed much of the building. Fortunately the statues and carvings survived in good enough condition to be rescued from the wreckage and restored. The wood panelling was replaced.
A final observation: I saw a television documentary in which a respected presenter said that there was a sliding panel in the theatre, concealing a space from which members of the Inquisition could observe lectures and intervene if the lecturer strayed into doctrinally forbidden territory. However I saw no evidence of this in the room itself, and no reference to it in any of the online sources. So appealing as the story might be, I suspect that it might be an urban myth – perhaps nurtured by Bologna’s famous anti-clericalism.
