Italy's Fat City — tortellini in brodo, Sunday ragù, and the world's oldest university
Bologna wears three nicknames like a badge of honour: La Grassa (the Fat, for a food culture that claims to have invented tortellini, tagliatelle al ragù, and mortadella), La Dotta (the Learned, for the University of Bologna, founded 1088 and the oldest university in the Western world), and La Rossa (the Red, for its terracotta-roofed architecture and its post-war communist municipal politics). The food culture is Italy's most technically serious — ragù is not a tomato sauce with meat added but a meat braise with a small amount of tomato at the end, and the distinction matters enormously to a…
Bologna was founded by the Etruscans (as Felsina, 6th century BC), colonized by the Boii Celts, and made a Roman colony as Bononia in 189 BC — the Roman street grid survives almost perfectly in the modern city center. In 1088, a group of students in Bologna organized what historians recognize as the first formal university in the Western world: a chartered, degree-granting institution that students paid to attend, rather than a cathedral school. Within decades the University of Bologna was the leading center of Roman law in Europe, drawing students from across the continent, including Dante.…