MUSEUMS
Most museums in Bologna and a few outside the city as well
University Museums
Anatomical Wax Museum
A large number of wax models are accompanied by a wealth of scientific documentation tracing the nineteenth-century historical period characterized by an orientation toward the study of congenital malformations and pathological cases in general.
Address: Via Irnerio 58, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Comparative anatomy Museum
Established in 1814, it preserves preparations, skeletons, and systematic collections. The fundamental theme addressed is the evolution of vertebrate through the observation of anatomical preparations of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.
Address: Via Selmi 3, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Anthropology Museum
The collection includes 4 sections. “Paleoanthropology and Prehistory”: display of casts of artifacts documenting the main evolutionary stages of humankind. “Anthropometric tools of historical and scientific interest”: display of characteristic historical tools used in anthropometric studies. “Facial casts, plaster and papier-mâché busts and coloring boards”: display of artifacts that are part of collections made in the early decades of the last century to document different human ethnicities. Finally, “Skeletal Biology and Bioarchaeology”: display of skeletons at different degrees of development.
Address: Via Selmi 3, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Botanical Garden and Herbarium
The Herbarium of the University of Bologna is one of the oldest in Europe. It houses collections of dried plants collected from the 16th century onward. Access is allowed only for researchers, with documented reasons for study, by appointment.
The Botanical Garden established in 1568 was the fourth in the world to be founded and contains about 1800 species and numerous tree specimens.
Address: Via Irnerio 42, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Zoological Museum
It is both as extensive area and as collections exhibited and preserved, one of the most important zoological museums in Italy. Currently on the ground floor are the ornithological collections, African trophies and dioramas. On the second floor are the systematic collections of the most important animal groups and the Altobello collection including amphibians, reptiles and mammals.
Address: Via Selmi 3, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Physics Museum
The Museum, established in 1907, preserves the following important nuclei: instruments of nineteenth-century experimental physics, Augusto Righi’s original teaching and experimental equipment, Quirino Majorana’s pure or applied teaching and research devices, apparatus from the school of advanced training in Radiocommunications that arose in the tradition of Righi’s and Marconi’s studies and was developed by Majorana and Todesco.
Address: Via Irnerio 46, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Astronomy Museum
The Specola Museum is in the 18th-century tower, built to house the Astronomical Observatory of the Institute of Sciences. In the rooms once dedicated to observational activities, the instruments used by Bolognese astronomers over the centuries have been relocated: valuable astrolabes, seventeenth-century wooden telescopes, fine eighteenth-century observation instruments, clocks, topographical, meteorological and computational instruments.
Address: Via Zamboni 33, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Geology Museum
The contributions that have been added over time have led to the current consistency of the collections, uninterrupted evidence of more than five hundred years of teaching and scientific research: a heritage of almost a million pieces arranged in the Museum’s halls and deposits, which make up the largest Italian geological and paleontological museum, in terms of number and importance of collections.
Address: Via Zamboni 63, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Mineralogy Museum
Established in 1860, it is probably the most important mineralogical museum in Italy due to its multiple historical and educational holdings. The collection currently includes about forty-eight thousand mineral and rock specimens, ten thousand of which are on display and organized into collections of various sizes and importance.
Address: Piazza di Porta San Donato 1, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Museum of Domestic Animal Anatomy
Established in 1882, the last inventory reconnaissance noted the presence of about 1,500 anatomical preparations, concerning all domestic species, preserved according to the “dry” method.
Address: Via Tolara di sopra 50, Ozzano Emilia (BO)
Info and tickets: official website
Museum of Anatomical Pathology and Veterinary Teratology
There are 4350 preparations present. These are dry preparations, materials preserved in alcohol, taken surgically or during necropsies in animals, and teratological skeletons collected from 1807 to 1835. From 1835 to 1890 color drawings and admirable plaster and wax plastics (models) reproducing the original pathological specimens in equal volume and color unique in the world were made.
Address: Via Tolara di sopra 50, Ozzano Emilia (BO)
Info and tickets: official website
City Museums
Pinacoteca Nazionale of Bologna (National Gallery)
The Pinacoteca offers an important and rich overview of Bolognese and Emilian painting from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, but also houses a variety of works by non-Bolognese artists who had something to do with the city in some way (among the best known: Giotto, Raffaello, Tintoretto, Vasari, Tiziano). Established in 1808 as the picture gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts, it became an independent museum in 1882.
In addition to its main location on Via delle Belle Arti, it also has a secondary location at Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande on Via Castiglione.
Address: Via delle Belle Arti 56, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Civic Museum of the Middle Ages
The Museum is one of the leading museums of medieval art in Italy and is dedicated to the preservation and enhancement of the artistic heritage of the city of Bologna and the Emilia-Romagna region pertaining mainly, but not exclusively, to the period from the 13th to the 15th century. The museum’s permanent collection includes paintings, sculpture, ceramics, silver and textiles, including works by local artists such as Vitale da Bologna, Jacopo della Quercia and Niccolò dell’Arca. The museum also often hosts a variety of temporary exhibitions and offers educational programs for visitors of all ages.
Address: Via Manzoni 4, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Archaelogical Museum
The Archaeological Museum of Bologna is one of the best known and most visited museums in the city and is one of the most important archaeological museums in Italy. It collects artifacts ranging from prehistoric to Roman times and is strongly representative of local history.
Address: Via dell’Archiginnasio 2, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Municipal Art Collections
Founded in 1936, it’s now on the second floor of Palazzo d’Accursio. The rich collection includes paintings from the Middle Ages to the present day, art objects, furniture, porcelain, fabrics, lace, embroidery, miniatures and important wooden crucifixes. The collections are configured as a “furnished museum,” articulated in rooms that keep the original decorations intact and in which the furniture is the protagonist.
Address: Palazzo d’Accursio, Piazza Maggiore 6, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Civic Museum of Industrial Art and Davia Bargellini Gallery
The museum is housed on the ground floor of Palazzo Davia Bargellini, which, erected during the 17th century, is among the largest civic buildings in Bologna in terms of size and nobility of layout. Opened to the public in 1924, it consists of two distinct cores: the picture gallery and the industrial art collections, the fusion of which in the baroque rooms of the museum was to create a real furnished apartment of eighteenth-century Bologna.
Address: Strada Maggiore 44, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
International Museum and Library of Music
The International Museum and Library of Music in Bologna was born from a project of the City of Bologna and opened in 2004. It is housed at Palazzo Sanguinetti, a prestigious 16th-century building overlooking the central Strada Maggiore. The museum also has a very rich music library with several thousand precious volumes: manuscripts, printed books and librettos.
Address: Strada Maggiore 34, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Museum of Industrial Heritage
Founded in 1982, the museum was born out of the rediscovery of historical materials from the Aldini Valeriani Technical Institute, commissioned by the city of Bologna on the occasion of the centenary of the city’s oldest technical school. The research, conducted by a group of economic history scholars from the University of Bologna, resulted in the exhibition “Macchine Scuola Industria” set up in the former Sala Borsa between 1980 and 1981. From then until the mid-1990s, the museum’s holdings found space in a wing of the building housing the School Institute. Today the museum, located in the former Galotti Furnace, tells the story of industrial Bologna from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Address: Via della Beverara 123, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Risorgimento Museum
Located on the ground floor of Casa Carducci, the poet’s last home and now a national monument. The display, which exhibits a small percentage of the museum’s holdings, follows a path divided into five thematic-chronological areas ranging from the French Revolution to the Great War, with a privileged view aimed at local events and protagonists. The display begins with 1796-the year of the arrival of French revolutionary troops in Bologna-and reaches 1918, at the end of World War I.
Address: Piazza Carducci 5, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Certosa of Bologna
The cemetery founded in 1801 stands just outside the center of Bologna, connected by a portico to San Luca, and is one of the oldest cemeteries in Europe. Fulcrum of the cemetery is the Chiostro Terzo, a faithful reflection of local neoclassical culture. The interior preserves a vast collection of paintings and sculptures created by almost all Bologna artists active in the 19th and 20th centuries, joined in recent years by a number of works of contemporary artists.
Address: Via della Certosa 18, Bologna
Info and tickets: sito ufficiale
Palazzo Pepoli Vecchio, Museum of History of Bologna
Palazzo Pepoli is home to a museum dedicated to the history, culture and transformations of Bologna, from Etruscan times to the present day. The history of the city and its inhabitants is told through a series of exhibitions built around key episodes, symbolic characters, anecdotes and cross-cutting themes, the presentation of which is done through a combination of objects, images and multimedia elements.
Address: Via Castiglione 8, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Palazzo Fava, Exhibition Centre
Historical palace in Bologna dating back to the Middle Ages, now converted into the Exhibition Centre. National and international exhibitions are regularly held there, such as “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” and “From Cimabue to Morandi-Felsina Pittrice.”
Address: Via Manzoni 2, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Modern Museums
MAMbo - Museum of Modern Art of Bologna and Morandi Museum
Opened in 2007, it is part of the Modern and Contemporary Art area of the Bologna Civic Museums Sector. The museum traces the history of Italian art from after World War II to the present and is constantly being renovated. Alongside the Permanent Collection, extensive monographic exhibitions dedicated to important Italian and international artists are organized. Since 2012, in addition, MAMbo has temporarily housed the Morandi Museum.
Address: Via Don Giovanni Minzoni 14, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Villa delle Rose
A former holiday residence of the Cella family, indicated by 18th-century land registers as “Casino Cella,” it was built in the second half of the 1700s. In 1916 the Municipality of Bologna acquired the property, using it to house the Modern Art Gallery in the late 1920s. It was called Villa delle Rose because of its abundance of flowers.
Address: Via Saragozza, 230, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Museum for the Memory of Ustica
Created around the relic of the Itavia DC9 that was shot down in the Italian skies on June 27, 1980, killing 81 people. Inside you can see the permanent installation “A proposito di Ustica (2007)”, created by one of the most relevant contemporary artists who recently passed away, Christian Boltanski. The work focuses on the themes of shared memory and its possibility of being passed down through time.
Address: Via di Saliceto 3/22, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
MOTOR VALLEY
Ferrari Museums (Modena and Maranello)
To reach the destination you can take a train from Bologna Centrale to Modena Stazione (30 min) and from there you can take a shuttle that connects the 2 museums.
Address: Via Paolo Ferrari, 85, Modena MO + Via Alfredo Dino Ferrari, 43, Maranello MO
Info and tickets: official website
Ducati Museum
To reach the Museum from Centrale Train Station there are several solutions:
– taxi (20 min)
– bus 36 + bus 13 (40 min) with final stop “Borgo Panigale Museo Ducati”
– train (10 min) with stop at Borgo Panigale + bus 13 with stop “Borgo Panigale Museo Ducati”
Address: Via Antonio Cavalieri Ducati, 3, Bologna
Info and tickets: official website
Lamborghini Museum
To reach the museum you can take the bus 576 from the stop “Bologna Autostazione” at Piazza XX Settembre 6 to stop “Sant’Agata B. Chiesa Frati” (1hr). After 4 minutes by foot you’ll reach the destination.
Address: Via Modena, 12 – Sant’Agata Bolognese (BO)
Info and tickets: official website
