Why is it called Piazza Maggiore?

What does maggiore mean?

Maggiore is the comparative of grande, the everyday Italian word for big, so its first meaning is bigger or greater. It comes from the Latin maior, itself the comparative of magnus, great. Italians also use it to mark the most important of a set, which is the sense in the square’s name: Treccani’s example is l’albero maggiore, the main mast of a ship.

Once you know it, you see it everywhere:

So the name ranks the square by importance. It was the square where the city government sat, not one measured against the others.

What was Piazza Maggiore called before?

When the commune began buying and clearing the houses on the site in 1200, it was making a public square for itself, and until the 15th century the space was known in Latin as the Curia Comunis or the Platea Comunis. Both mean, roughly, the commune’s square. The Comune di Bologna’s own description of the porticoes still calls it the platea communis created in the 13th century.

Piazza Maggiore came into use in the 16th century. The city’s historical archive, Storia e Memoria di Bologna, dates its first written record to 1583.

The same adjective names one of Bologna’s main streets. Strada Maggiore follows the line of the Roman Via Aemilia, and in the Middle Ages it was the Strata Maior, first recorded in 1162.

Why did the name change after 1860?

Politics. After Italian unification the square was renamed Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, after the first king of united Italy (1860, according to the Italian Wikipedia entry). Monteverde’s equestrian statue of the king was inaugurated in the square in June 1888.

The war undid both. The statue was moved to the Giardini Margherita park in 1944. Under the Italian Social Republic the square was briefly called Piazza della Repubblica; sources disagree on the year that began. After Liberation in 1945 it went back to Piazza Maggiore, and the name has not changed since.

In short:

• 1200: the commune starts clearing the site for its platea communis.
• 1583: first written record of the name Piazza Maggiore.
• From 1860: Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II.
• 1888: the king’s equestrian statue goes up in the square.
• 1944: the statue moves to the Giardini Margherita.
• 1945: back to Piazza Maggiore.

The buildings around it tell the same story in stone. The Palazzo del Podestà, on the north side, went up as the commune cleared the ground, and our page on when Piazza Maggiore was built follows the rest. For what made it a piazza in the first place, see what a piazza is in Italy. If you would rather hear the story on the spot, a short small-group walk that begins with half an hour on the square is the cheapest guided option on our tours page.