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We are taking you to Bologna, one of the great cities of Italy, quite famous for its food.
00:00 Intro
:43 porticoes
3:04 cafes
3:29 Piazza Santo Stefano
4:21 Piazza Maggiore
6:01 Portico del Pavaglione
6:52 Frescoes
7:31 portico evolution
8:35 why porticoes?
9:23 sightseeing tram
9:42 main street
11:32 Asinelli Tower
12:54 Strada Maggiore
15:50 portico history
17:02 UNESCO
Although here they do not eat baloney. They have a similar meat they call mortadella, and they don't eat spaghetti bolognese. They call that red sauce a ragu. And they never serve it on spaghetti, more likely on tagliatelle and other pastas. Bologna is also famous for its university, the oldest in the world, and the well-preserved historic center, one of the largest in the country, accented with those two prominent medieval towers which have become the symbol of the city. But there is one particular feature that makes this city unique in all the world. It has the longest collection of covered sidewalks. It's called a portico, which is a roof over the sidewalk that is held up by columns.
The plural in Italian is portici, or an English porticoes. You might also call them arcades or loggia or colonnades. These sheltered sidewalks extend for 38 kilometers in the city, with another 15 kilometers reaching beyond the center. They have such tremendous cultural and historic importance that UNESCO has declared them a World Heritage site. This is the world's longest collection of sheltered sidewalks, and many of the piazzas are surrounded by porticoes.
So in this program, will be combining a look at the porticoed roads, as well as some of the more interesting piazzas that have porticoes around them. These arcades serve two basic functions. One is to provide shelter from the sun, the rain, the occasional snow, while they also enable the buildings to extend out over the sidewalk, creating additional floor space in the building's upper levels.
Perhaps even more importantly, the porticoes provide an outdoor living room, a shared community space where people can interact, serving as crossroads of civic life. A place where you are at home, but also out in the world. A meeting place to stop and chat, run into neighbors, make new friends, do a little smooching, maybe fall in love. These arcades provide a social network that ties this city together.
Porticoes also create a delightful ambiance, a sheltered area that brings the outdoors in and the indoors out. It's kind of an in-between space that encourages pedestrian traffic while increasing access to the many shops that line these streets, which can display products for sale in outdoor stands and in the old days were used by craftsmen for making things. It's like an early version of our modern shopping malls.
Porticoes also provide a comfortable setting for the numerous outdoor cafes and restaurants that you'll find throughout the city. You will often see the restaurant expanding out beyond the portico into the adjacent street or piazza, creating additional useful spaces, which gives customers the choice to sit indoors or under the portico or out in the open. A fine example of that is the very popular Piazza Santo Stefano, which has a triangular shape with porticoes on two sides of medieval and Renaissance origin, and the Church of Santo Stefano at the end with seven churches inside it, including an octagonal portico in one of the ancient churches and a beautiful cloister surrounded by two levels of columns and arches.
We'll see more of this in a separate movie about the churches of Bologna. Another interesting building on this piazza is Palazzo Salina, with a portico clad in terracotta. Its nickname is the Palace of the Heads, because there are 300 faces looking down at us from the facade. The largest piazza in town just a few blocks away is Piazza Maggiore, with more porticoes along several of the most important buildings in Bologna.
The main square of Bologna is always a busy place, daytime and right into the evening. It's surrounded by the big church, the town hall cafes and little lanes leading off from it that have many restaurants, lots of outdoor eateries. It's an amazing busy place.t

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