Bologna · Things to do

The university's seventeenth-century seat, walls plastered with the coats of arms of former students, and a carved wooden dissection theatre rebuilt after wartime bombing.

A public library in a covered courtyard with a glass floor over excavated Roman and Etruscan streets. Free to walk in and look down.

Bologna's modern art museum in a converted bread factory, with a wing devoted to Giorgio Morandi's bottles.

The reassembled wreckage of the DC-9 shot down off Ustica in 1980, hung in a darkened hall with a Christian Boltanski installation around it. Free, and quietly devastating.

A shutter in a wall opening onto the Canale delle Moline, the last visible stretch of the canal network the city built over. Twenty seconds of sightseeing, and worth it.