The university's best professors are buried around the town, some alone like this one and others inside churches.
Don't blame me for taking a crooked picture, the town's Torre degli Asinelli a 4ft lean.
The trademark portico/arcade covering that allow you to travel the entire city in the rain without getting wet. Thank goodness for that with the weather I had.
Piazza dei Nettuno. A meeting place for us before grabbing dinner.
Unfinished Basilica of San Petronio that had the money not run out, would have been more elaborate and extravagant than the one in the Vatican.
Neptune again. He makes an, uh, interesting shadow on the building I'm in front of at night. “Suggestive” is the word Caro likes to use.
Family crests from former students at the university. During the war the building was destroyed, but they put it back together and you'd never know half the walls fell down.
Another view of the taller tower. Eventually, I climed it. There's a smaller one, too, but the lean of 10ft makes it unsafe to climb and therefore closed to the public.
After climbing all 498 steps up the tower, here's what I saw on another drizzly day.
Lots of rickety, slick stairs.
The day was no exception to the week’s cool, foggy, drizzly weather. The stairs were slick and sneaker sole-polished after nine centuries of traversal. Young and old alike had to brave the stairs for the panoramic view of the medieval university town since there was no elevator. Just as the tower was no longer upright, leaning four feet from vertical, the steps had also lost their perpendicularity. Each step was like a child’s plastic bucket seat, dipping down and slopping in the middle from the deliberate foot-placement they required. If it weren’t for the platforms, I would have slid down all 498 wooden stairs.
A different version of the porticos. People will still carry their umbrella for the five seconds you might expose yourself crossing from one set of porticos to the next.
