Museo Civico Archeologico

Next to the Palazzo dei Banchi, facing the great, gloomy wall of San Petronio, is Bologna’s excellent Museo Civico Archeologico, occupying the building of an old hospital on Via dell’Archiginnasio with the reassuring name of Ospedale della Morte.

It's crammed full with one of Italy’s best collections of antiquities – beautifully wrought items from the Iron Age Villanova culture, finely wrought urns and jewellery that clearly show these people as the precursors of the Etruscans.

These are followed by artefacts from Etruscan Velzna (the Etruscan name of Bologna, latinized as Felsina). Velzna may have been a frontier town, compared with the wealthy and cultivated Etruscan metropolises of Tuscany and northern Lazio, but it is richly represented here with funerary art.