A striking city of ubiquitous red roofs, circuitous streets, and massive porticoed sidewalks, Bologna sits between the Reno and Idice rivers where they escape out of the Apennines to journey north across the valley of the Po. Nestled against verdant hills of surprising beauty that open on to a plain of rich farmland, Bologna currently offers the appearance of a terra-cotta sculpture in a garden of abundance. In the nineteenth century, this portrait was all the more picturesque because great turreted walls, punctuated and perforated by twelve elaborate gates, still surrounded the city. Within the walls, solid parish churches dominated their neighborhoods, rivaled only by the massive palazzi of the major families, whose pedigrees dated back to the sixteenth century, if not before. Squarely in the middle of the city, the elegant Piazza Maggiore – bounded by thirteenth-century public halls, fifteenth-century luxury apartments, and an enormous unfinished Gothic cathedral – served as the geographic and symbolic center of social and political activity. Nearby were the fancy painted hallways of the Archigennasio which had once been the seat of the University of Bologna, an institution going back to the twelfth century and a source of great pride to the Bolognesi. Overlooking it all, stood the Garisenda and Asinelli Towers, inverted analogs of Bologna's long medieval roots.

Such sturdy ostentation bespoke the city's past prosperity, based in large part on its political and economic domination of the surrounding province and its rich agricultural produce.