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In a neighbourhood trattoria, over a plate of frittura mista, Umberto Eco is giving serious thought to the question of why Bologna - perhaps Italy's most dynamic city - is not a magnet for tourists.

"It's all texture and no excrescence", he decides. In other words, it is a city of communal spaces, arcades, bars, shops, a city whose sightlines are designed to meet shopfronts, café tables and other people's eyes, rather than to gaze admiringly at showpiece monuments like the Tower of Pisa. "OK, so Bologna has two leaning towers, but they're hemmed in by other buildings... it's not a city you can 'do' in half a day. You have to give it time, it's not a city of facades".

Also, it has long been a city that didn't need tourists. A mercantile centre with one of the highest per capita incomes in Italy, Bologna is known to envious outsiders as "la Grassa", the fat one. There is no doubt that the bolognesi are good eaters - and drinkers - but this is just one outward sign of their joy in the here and now. Milan has risotto alla milanese - a dish based on saffron, for God's sake - while Bologna has plump, uncompromising, meat-filled tortellini. Turin turns out sensible Fiats, Bologna (together with nearby Modena) prefers to put its foot on the gas: Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis and Ducati motorbikes are all produced hereabouts.

Eco, a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, has worked here for thirty years. It seem entirely fitting that his own voracious academic and literary activity should be rooted in a city that takes such an obvious pleasure in all that the mind and body can absorb. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Bologna had few rivals as a centre of learning: it was a keystone of the Medieval scholarly revival that provides the backdrop to Eco's monastic whodunnit The Name of the Rose. Even today, he says, Bologna is "the only Italian city with a campus of this size that is part of the fabric of the city centre". Student life spills out into the street, "and it's given more force and cohesion by the portici - the arcades - with their bars and osterie, which act as forums for the exchange of ideas and information, even at three in the morning".

Ah, those arcades. Caught out by a rainstorm after lunch with il professore, I was grateful to them, and pitied the itinerant umbrella sellers, who have a harder time here than in any other Italian city. In the feuding Middle Ages, houses were built with projecting upper floors supported on wooden stilts, well away from the marauding factions below; in time, stone replaced wood, and the underlying spaces - previously used by tradesmen and artisans - became long, roofed walkways which married Bologna's twin obssessions, comfort and contemplation. But mere necessity was soon left far behind; the portici went forth and multiplied as in no other Italian city, reaching their apotheosis in the extraordinary Portico di San Luca, the arcade equivalent of a seventies guitar solo, which connects the city walls with the Santuario di San Luca in a two-mile uphill zigzag.

Some time ago, reflecting on why the walking pace of the average bolognese was so frustratingly slow - even young students, he says, adopt a slouch that forces a fast walker like him into a sort of "pavement slalom" - Eco realised it was because the arcades meant that the pace was set by the tortoise, rather than the hare. "In Bologna, the arcades offer a protected environment for the elderly that you find in no other Italian city. Elsewhere, old people stay indoors rather than brave the traffic. Here, they are all out under the arcades, walking slowly, often arm in arm. You can't get past them, so you have to shuffle along at their speed." But for many visitors, fresh from the experience of negotiating what in Rome or Naples or even Florence passes for a pavement, a slower pace is a small price to pay for guaranteed pedestrian security.



If - ignoring Eco's advice - you really do want to get a feel for Bologna in just a day, there are five essential sights that need to be visited before you join the locals in their favourite pursuits: strolling, chatting, eating and drinking.

Bologna is a mandala, a pizza cut into slices, a bicycle wheel. It's easy to go along the spokes into Piazza Maggiore, the centre of the Bolognese universe, but it's surprisingly difficult to cut across from one spoke to the other. For an overview, climb the worn wooden staircase on the inside of the Torre degli Asinelli. Seen from below, this looks a bit like one of those never-ending staircases which Escher liked to draw - must be something to do with the amusing tilt of the tower - and when you're around halfway up the 498 steps, it can feel like one too. From the top, though - after the wave of vertigo has subsided - the grand plan comes into focus, especially to the east, where four long, thin roads slice through the terracotta roofs with mathematical precision.

Piazza Maggiore, the heart of the mandala, the hub of the wheel, the belly-button of the cosmos (bolognesi like to claim that tortellini are modelled on Venus' navel) changes according to the time of day. In the morning it's a square of crossing paths as people hurry to work, to the lecture theatre, to the bar, to lunch. By the afternoon it has begun to hold its public: huddles of old men, children chasing pigeons. In the evening, the steps of San Petronio fill up with sitting youth of all persuasions, from punkabbestia (Italian slang for a dog-accompanied-post-punk) squatters to dawdling office workers. The facade of the church itself - Bologna's de facto cathedral - is a tempting symbol for a city which not long ago was lambasted by its own archbishop for loose morals and godlessness. Somehow, it was never finished: a beautiful rose-and-cream Gothic lower storey, with intricate bas relief panels by Jacopo della Quercia around the main door, gives way to a dark, vaguely menacing brick upper section. Like the city, San Petronio is the devil's from the waist up; that's why it's so enjoyable.

Set at one end of a pretty cobbled square, Santo Stefano is not one church but several, fused over the centuries into a sort of one-stop spiritual shop. Veined alabaster windows fill the Byzantine church of San Vitale with a glowing orange light; next door, the twelve-sided Chiesa del Santo Sepolcro, with its Roman columns and central tomb of Bolognese patron saint San Petronio, feels more pagan temple than Christian shrine. Under the arcades that run along the south side of the square, young bolognesi can be seen rollerblading of an evening.

Students used to come from all over Europe to study in Bologna, attending lectures in the various faculties and lodging in national colleges. (The Collegio di Spagna, founded in 1364, still exists; today, it acts as a post-graduate finishing school for the Spanish professional and political elite). By the sixteenth century, though, Bologna was a part of the Papal States, and the Holy See was nervous about keeping control over such a headless, diffuse campus. Which is why the Archiginnasio was built, close up against San Petronio, to unify the scattered departments. Inside, every inch of wall and ceiling space is occupied by the coats of arms of former rectors, professors and students. Upstairs, the Teatro Anatomico is a Baroque concerto in wood - all except for the marble slab in the centre where bodies were dissected. The canopy over the professor's chair is held up by two scannati, or flayed human figures; opposite was a grate through which the Pope's legate could observe the lesson, making sure that no heresies were pronounced and that the two parts of the body that the Church considered out of bounds to science - the brain and the heart - were not touched by the knife.

Which is what Giorgio Morandi used to scrape the paint off the many canvases he was unsatisfied with. "Here are most of my paintings" he told a rare visitor to his studio, pointing to the thick accumulation of pigment on the crossbar of his easel. Some of the works that did meet his exacting standards are on show at the Museo Morandi, which opened in 1993 on the top floor of fourteenth-century Palazzo d'Accursio, the huge bastion of a town hall overlooking Piazza Maggiore. Morandi (1890-1964) painted bottles, jars, jugs and the occasional tin. On the rare occasions when he felt the need for a different subject, Morandi painted what he could see form the window of his studio: rooftops, the tangle of trees in the courtyard. In Venice, once, as they were both gazing out across the lagoon, a collector friend asked Morandi why he didn't paint the scene. "If I could stay here for the next three years, I might", was the artists' reply. It is this patient, unhurried concentration on the act of seeing that draws us in to Morandi's canvases - so different in mood from the virtuoso posturings of Bologna's other famous artistic sons, Guido Reni and Annibale Carracci.



Eco once wrote a satirical essay - "Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society" - in which he puts himself in the shoes of a Melanesian anthropologist sent to study the urban agglomerate of Milan. The anthropologist admonishes his Melanesian reader - perhaps too quick to assume cultural superiority over "peoples of no colour" - that "gathering coconuts by climbing a palm tree with bare feet is not necessarily a form of behaviour superior to that of the primitive who travels by jet aircraft and eats fried potatoes from a plastic bag". He goes on to ennumerate the typical tasks of the Milanese native: "the sowing of transistors, the putting of motor scooters out to graze, the breeding of alfaromeos, and so on".

Years after this divertissement first appeared in print, a UNESCO-funded programme organised by French anthopologist Alain Le Pichon gave Eco the chance to see what would happen if it were taken seriously. A group of African academics and artists were invited to Europe to study the locals. Bologna was assigned to a Senegalese storyteller, Diawné Diamanka. Among Diawné's observations - that almost nothing was free, that you could talk to a Bolognese woman without first having been introduced to her husband - was the following:

"In Bologna, I saw a clean and tidy place where old men meet in the morning to talk about politics. They leave that place only to go for a coffee or a glass of wine in the bar next door, then they return".

How right Diawné was. Stroll along the Strada Maggiore, dotted with serious coffee-drinking bars like the Bar dei Commercianti, or hang out under the arcades on the east side of Piazza Maggiore, and you'll see the old men - who move outside in good weather - talking animatedly about referendums, or the pension system, or Silvio Berlusconi's latest rant. Football rarely gets a look in. In Red Bologna, politics is still the favourite condiment - especially now that the city has its first centre-right mayor in living memory, Giorgio Guazzaloca. The old men's favourite pastime is to track down someone who will admit to having voted for Guazzaloca - not an easy task - and start an argument. In the absence of any suitable candidates, the old men's second favourite pastime is to argue amongst themselves about the uselessness of the Left, before heading back to the osteria for another glass of Lambrusco or Sangiovese or to the bar for a coffee so strong that it sticks to the cup.



"Never ask for a caffè ristretto in Bologna", is Eco's parting shot. "The Bolognese already make the most concentrated espresso in the whole of Italy. If you order a caffè ristretto, what you get is virtual coffee".

This article originally appeared in Conde Nast Traveller (UK)

Read more travel writing by Lee Marshall