What are the 7 secrets of Bologna?

The seven secrets, one by one

Lists vary from guide to guide. This is the version published by Bologna Welcome, the city’s official tourism site, and other local lists use the same seven in a different order.

1. The window on Via Piella (16/a to 18/a). A small shuttered window, painted the same color as the wall, opens onto the Canale delle Moline running between the backs of the houses.
2. Neptune’s thumb (Piazza del Nettuno). From a dark paving stone near the Salaborsa entrance, the bronze Neptune’s outstretched thumb looks like something else entirely. Bologna Welcome repeats the story that Giambologna meant it as a protest against censorship. Treat that as a story. Details on the Neptune Fountain page.
3. The arrows of Corte Isolani (Strada Maggiore 19). Three arrows are stuck in the wooden portico ceiling. In Bologna Welcome’s version of the legend, bandits fired at an aristocrat and missed. Another version, told by the travel site SiViaggia, has killers distracted by a woman at a window. Neither is documented.
4. The Voltone del Podestà (Piazza Maggiore). Whisper into one corner of the vaulted passage under Palazzo del Podestà and someone in the opposite corner hears you. The tale that it was built so lepers could confess is, by Bologna Welcome’s own account, a rumor nobody can confirm.
5. Canabis Protectio (Via dell’Indipendenza 3). Painted on a portico ceiling: Panis Vita, Canabis Protectio, Vinum Laetitia. Bread is life, hemp is protection, wine is joy.
6. Panum Resis (Via Zamboni 33). An inscription on a desk inside Palazzo Poggi, the university’s headquarters. Bologna Welcome glosses it as knowledge being the foundation. We found no independent source for that reading.
7. The broken vase on top of the Torre degli Asinelli. In Bologna Welcome’s words, no one has yet managed to find it.

Where each one is

Walking times from the middle of Piazza Maggiore, measured on OpenStreetMap foot routing (Checked October 2026):

Two practical points. The Voltone is a public passage, free and open at all hours, and so is the street outside the Via Piella window. The Asinelli, on the other hand, has been closed to visitors since 23 October 2023, so the vase hunt has to be done from the ground for now. The Due Torri page has the latest.

A loop from the square works well: the Voltone and Neptune first, then north up Via dell’Indipendenza to the inscription and on to Via Piella, east to Via Zamboni, down to the towers and finish at Corte Isolani, whose courtyards come out on Piazza Santo Stefano and are open in the daytime. An orientation walk through the center on day one makes the streets easier to find on your own afterwards. Our things to do in Bologna guide has the rest of what is nearby.

Why students avoid crossing Piazza Maggiore

The secrets have a cousin in student folklore, and Bologna Welcome lists three rules in its piece on magical Bologna.

• Do not cross Piazza Maggiore diagonally. A University of Bologna student who does, the story goes, puts their path to graduation at risk.
• Do not climb the Torre degli Asinelli and its 498 steps before you finish your degree. Since 2023 the closure has made this one easy to keep.
• Do walk twice anticlockwise around the Neptune Fountain for luck in exams.

Bologna Welcome presents them as superstition, not history. A visitor can cross however they like. If you are with a Bologna student and they take the long way round the edge of the square, now you know why.