The Archiginnasio, the Seat of the University of Bologna in Modern Times

The Alma Mater Studiorum of Bologna, believed to be the first university of the western world, began its life towards the end of the 11th century, when the masters of grammar, rhetoric and logic opened to juridical studies. Since then teaching independent of the ecclesiastical schools became rooted in the city and it was spread beyond its borders with the names of some of its most illustrious masters, such as the glossarist Irnerio and his disciples and continuers (Bulgaro, Martino, Jacopo and Ugo di Porta Ravegnana) . The free collectio of money among the disciples guaranteed teaching originally, regularly paid for only when the council of Bologna bore the cost to stabilize the city’s schools and Federico I Barbarossa protected the young institution with an Imperial constitution (1158) that was supposed to safeguard teaching both from the intrusions of any external authority and the people of the scholares who were travelling for reasons of study. Moreover, the students themselves grew stronger on the basis of their origins: on the one hand, the Citramontani (this side of the mountains, Italians, but not Bolognese, Lombards, Tuscans and Romans) and on the other, the Ultramontani (non-Italians, living beyond the Alps, French, Spanish, Provencal, English, Picards, Burgundians, Normans, Catalans, Hungarians, Poles, Germans, etc). The ideal and economic autonomy of the university made the student population grow – in the 14th century it was over two thousand students – and enriched the teaching provision, because the jurists were flanked by the “artists,” that is the scholars of medicine, philosophy, arithmetic, logical, rhetoric and grammar, and, from 1364, the theologians. In the course of time, teaching became ever newer and richer: not only with Greek and Hebrew, but also with the new disciplines, such as “natural magic,” that is experimental science, well represented by the philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi , the scientist Ulisse Aldrovandi , the plastic surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi . Great European intellectuals loved to pass through the university of Bologna, from Dante to Petrarch, from Thomas Becket to Paracelsus, from Raimundo de Peñafort to Albrecht Dürer, from Carlo Borromeo to Torquato Tasso; Pico della Mirandola and Leon Battista Alberti studied canon law there, as did Mikołaj Kopernik, who at the same time pursued his astronomical observations. As the institution was being consolidated and its image was also being disseminated abroad as well, the need grew for a seat that could reflect the antiquity of the foundation and could offer at the same time the possibility to valorise all the potential of the university in the new times that were being envisioned in the 16th century. Indeed, it was then that people started to talk about a single and prestigious seat for the Bolognese university, that would appear – as Michel de Montaigne observed in 1580 – the most beautiful building dedicated to the teaching of the sciences