And as for signs saying “We Speak Inglish Here”, no chance: the Bolognese are crap at English. Bereft of tourist influence, Bologna has a concentrated Italianness long lost in the more famous tourist towns.
Start your first day with a cappuccino and a bombolone (a featherweight Italian doughnut) in the magnificently munificent Piazza Maggiore. The square is the centre point of a star of cobbled main streets lined with buildings painted in a stipulated range of reddish to yellowish hues, all with roofs of terracotta. One of Europe’s best-preserved medieval towns, it’s thrilling just wandering the galleried streets of a city which must still look very much like it did seven hundred years ago.As you wander you will soon notice that here people just love to spend their money. There can be few places on earth with a wider selection of the latest in car and motorbike designs than Bologna. It’s like stepping into some kind of transport heaven.As for clothes, the Bolognese spend much of their waking life shopping for them. To be seen wearing anything bought more than a few weeks back (and worn more than about twice) results in a reputation as something called brutta figura: loosely translated, a “sorry sight”, not something Italians like to see too often.

Even shop windows are exquisitely dressed, whether they are selling clothes, antiques or mortadella sausage.Yes, the Bolognese do dress to impress. Even the ones who aren’t rich look rich – in fact, most of these tend to look stinking rich. Sometimes this consumer obsession and apparent well-being make Bologna look like the ultimate capitalist society: ironic, really, considering its past 50 years of communist local government.To the intelligence agencies of the West during the Cold War, Bologna was a big embarrassment – evidence that the Russian bear had its claws embedded in the heart of Europe. How come everyone kept voting communist and the place was so bloody successful economically? The CIA kept asking itself whether its local government was uniquely efficient compared to the rest of the country, and whether its public services were somehow brilliant It all had to be a cunning Soviet plot. Forces of the right with links to western intelligence appear to have become so incensed with the place they blew up Bologna’s railway station in 1980, killing 85 people.

When the Soviet Empire collapsed, Bologna didn’t.A good place to ponder these weighty thoughts is the Bar dei Commercianti in Strada Maggiore. Known as il bar degli intellettuali, you may run into Umberto Eco as he takes a break from teaching at the drama faculty round the corner. And if you don’t run into him, well, who cares – chi se ne frega – by now it’s probably time to concentrate on a late-morning glass of vino bianco frizzante (fizzy white wine) and a tramezzino (tasty little sandwich).Food and drink will feature rather regularly as you potter around town. The immaculately dressed windows of the salumerie (salame shops) and rosticcerie (five-star take-away food shops), the latterie (dairies of gorgeous cheeses) and panaderie (bakeries) will set you drooling early on in the day.Bologna La Grassa – the Fat One – has been famous for hundreds of years for its delicious and fattening food. The local “priest strangler” pasta, or strozzapreti, was named after the notoriously greedy local clergy who were known for gorging themselves on local delicacies.

A word of advice: don’t try to order spaghetti alla Bolognese here. The Bolognese don’t know what it is, and can be incredibly snotty about dish nomenclature Tagliatelle alla Bolognese – that’s OK. But when you bung the same sauce over spaghetti it becomes spaghetti al ragu.Worried about over-eating? Think you need an intellectual fix after all this instant gratification? The waxworks at the university’s Department of Human Anatomy (Via Imerio 48) will kill both birds with one gory stone. The exhibits, still used for teaching purposes, consist of intricately detailed pieces of every human innard (and outtard) you may imagine – and many you wouldn’t even want to imagine.The waxworks are more than just a macabre interlude to your day Many of them are impressive works of art. The collection originated with the works of Ercole Lelli, a kind of Michelangelo of the morgue.