A Bombed-Out Anatomy Theater Was Rebuilt Piece by Piece From the Rubble

The wood-paneled Anatomical Theatre inside the Archiginnasio looks untouched by time, but almost none of it survived the Second World War intact. An Allied air raid on 29 January 1944 tore through this wing of the building and reduced the 17th-century theatre to wreckage. What saved it was what happened next: workers combing through the rubble recovered the original carved wooden statues and panels — including Ercole Lelli's two "Spellati," flayed figures that had flanked the professor's chair for two centuries — and architects spent years piecing the room back together with such fidelity that the reconstruction reused the salvaged originals wherever a fragment survived. The theatre you walk into today is largely the same wood that was there before the bomb hit, painstakingly reassembled rather than replaced.

Down at Piazza di Porta Ravegnana, the shorter of the two towers has been unsettling observers since long before Bologna started worrying about its stability. In Canto XXXI of the Inferno, Dante compares the tilt of a bending giant to how Torre Garisenda appears from below when clouds drift past on its leaning side — the tower looks as though it is falling toward the clouds rather than the clouds moving past the tower. Stand at its base on a windy day and the seven-century-old optical trick still works exactly as Dante described it.