Museo Civico Medievale

Housed in part of the quattrocento Palazzo Fava-Ghisliardi, the Museo Civico Medioevale is one of the unmissable sights of the city. Before you get to the good stuff, however, you’ll have to wade through the delightfully screwy private collections accumulated by 18th-century museums, which are preserved here for no apparent reason beyond our entertainment (also, as you may have noticed by now, Bologna is a city that never throws anything away).

There’s a mummified baby something, carved ostrich eggs and coconut shells from exotic climes, a smattering of pre-Columbian art, a carved narwhal tusk, and courtesans’ slippers from Venice with 18-inch heels (a fashion inspired by the harem of the Ottoman sultans).

Once through that, you’ll see something that really brings old Bologna back to life – a collection of the tombs of the great doctors of the University. By convention, these would be carved with images of the professors in relief, expounding to a crowd of attentive students. Part of the convention was to make these scenes as lifelike as possible – so many students, with so many faces from over the centuries, earnest, daydreaming or perplexed.