60 Amazing Vintage Photographs Capture Street Scenes of Bologna, Italy at the Turn of the 20th Century

Bologna is the capital and largest city of the Emilia-Romagna region in northern Italy. It is the seventh most populous city in Italy, with 390,734 inhabitants and 150 different nationalities. Its metropolitan province is home to more than 1 million people as of 2025. Bologna is most famous for being the home to the oldest university in continuous operation, the University of Bologna, established in AD 1088.

At the turn of the 20th century, Bologna retained much of its medieval charm, with its arcaded streets, red-brick buildings, and narrow alleyways. The city’s skyline was still dominated by its famous towers (though many had collapsed by then), and daily life often revolved around the piazzas, especially Piazza Maggiore and Via Rizzoli.

Horse-drawn carriages were still common in the early 1900s, but by the 1910s, Bologna had developed an efficient electric tram system — one of the first in Italy. The Bologna tram network, inaugurated in 1904, connected key areas like Porta San Felice, Porta Santo Stefano, and Piazza Maggiore, making the streets livelier with the sound of clanging bells and the hum of electric lines. Bicycles also became increasingly popular, reflecting the city’s flat landscape and student population.

Many streets preserved their Renaissance and medieval porticoes, providing shade and shelter — Bologna still holds over 38 kilometers of porticoes today. By the 1920s–1930s, under Fascist influence, parts of the city center saw urban renewal projects, widening streets and adding more modern facades — yet the heart of Bologna remained deeply historic.

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In the Middle Ages, the Italian City of Bologna Had Over 100 Skyscraper-Like Towers

Between the 12th and the 13th century, Bologna was a city full of towers. Almost all were tall (the highest being 97 meters (318.2 ft)), defensive stone towers. Besides the towers, there are still some fortified gateways (torresotti) that correspond to the gates of the 12th-century city wall (Mura dei torresotti or Cerchia dei Mille), which itself has been almost completely destroyed.

The construction of the towers was quite tedious, the usage of serfs notwithstanding. To build a typical tower with a height of 60 m would have required between three and ten years of work.

Each tower had a square cross-section with foundations between five and ten meters deep, reinforced by poles hammered into the ground and covered with pebble and lime. The tower’s base was made of big blocks of selenite stone. The remaining walls became successively thinner and lighter the higher the structure was raised, and were realized in so-called “a sacco” masonry: with a thick inner wall and a thinner outer wall, with the gap being filled with stones and mortar.

Usually, some holes were left in the outer wall as well as bigger hollows in the selenite to support scaffoldings and to allow for later coverings and constructions, generally on the basis of wood.

The towers must actually have crowded Bologna in the Middle Ages and there has been considerable debate about their peak number before the first ones were demolished to avoid collapse or for other reasons.

The first historian to study the towers of Bologna in a systematic way was Count Giovanni Gozzadini, a senator of the Italian kingdom in the 19th century, who studied the city’s history intensively, not least to raise the prestige of his home town in the context of the now united Italy. He based his analysis mostly on the civic archives of real estate deeds, attempting to arrive at a reliable number of towers on the basis of documented ownership changes. His approach resulted in the extraordinary number of 180 towers, an enormous amount considering the size and resources of medieval Bologna.

More recent studies pointed out that Gozzadini’s methodology might have led to multiple counts of buildings, which could have been referred to in legal documents by different names, depending on the name of the family who actually owned it at a given moment. More recent estimates therefore reduced the number to a total between 80 and 100, where not all towers existed at the same time.

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