Palazzo del Podestà, the Voltone and Palazzo Re Enzo

Palazzo del Podestà

The long, arcaded building along the north side of Piazza Maggiore was the seat of the podestà, the chief magistrate brought in from outside the city to govern it without local loyalties. It went up around 1200, at the same time the square itself was being cleared.

What you see now is not what a medieval Bolognese saw. Giovanni II Bentivoglio commissioned a remodel in 1453 and the architect Aristotile Fioravanti gave the building its Renaissance front: regular arches, pale stone, nothing of the fortified look the original had.

The interior halls open occasionally for exhibitions. Most of the time the building is closed and the reason to come is what runs underneath it.

The Voltone del Podestà

Walk under the middle of the building and you are in a double-arched vaulted crossing linking Piazza Maggiore to Piazza Re Enzo behind. In 1525 terracotta statues of Bologna’s four patron saints, Petronius, Proculus, Dominic and Francis, were set into it by Alfonso Lombardi. They are still there, high up in the corners, and are easy to miss because everyone is looking at their feet.

Then there is the trick. Stand facing one of the four corners of the crossing, close to the wall, and speak quietly into it. A person standing in the corner diagonally opposite, across the full width of the passage with people walking between you, hears you as if you were next to them. The curve of the vault carries the sound around the edge.

It works. It also fails completely if the passage is full of people talking, which is most of the middle of the day.

Guides in the square will tell you the acoustics were used so plague sufferers could confess without infecting the priest. We have not found a single historical source for that. It gets repeated because it is a good story, so treat it that way.

Torre dell’Arengo

Above the junction of Palazzo del Podestà and Palazzo Re Enzo sits the Torre dell’Arengo. A wooden tower was raised here in 1212 and rebuilt in brick in 1259 by Alberto di S. Pietro. It now stands about 47 meters tall on a base of 9 meters by 7.46 meters.

Its bell is the reason it exists. Known as the Campanazzo or Campanone, recast in bronze in 1453 by the same Aristotile Fioravanti who did the facade, and weighing roughly 47 quintals, about 12,000 pounds. It was rung to summon the citizens to the arengo, the public assembly. When it went, everyone in the city knew something was happening.

Palazzo Re Enzo

Directly behind the Podestà, facing its own small square, stands the Gothic palace that draws the second-best story on the piazza.

It was built between 1244 and 1246 as an extension of Palazzo del Podestà and originally called the Palatium Novum, the new palace. Five years later it acquired a resident it did not plan for. Enzo of Sardinia, illegitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, was captured by Bolognese forces at the Battle of Fossalta in 1249 and held here until his death in 1272. Twenty-three years.

Legend adds that he could move freely around the building by day but was locked into a cage suspended from the ceiling at night, and that he fathered children during the captivity, possibly including an ancestor of the Bentivoglio family who later ruled the city. The cage and the children are legend rather than record.

The Sala dei Trecento, the Hall of the Three Hundred, was finished in 1386 as the city archive. The palace was restored in 1771 and again in 1905, and it is the 1905 work that gave it the Gothic-revival face it wears today.

There are no fixed opening hours. It hosts exhibitions and events rather than working as a museum, so whether you can go in depends entirely on what is running. Check palazzoreenzo.com first.

Tips

• Try the whispering corners early morning or late evening. In the middle of the day the passage is too loud for it to work.
• Bring someone. This is the one sight on the square that needs two people.
• Stand close. Face into the corner with your mouth near the stone rather than speaking across the open space.
• Look up before you leave for Lombardi’s four terracotta saints in the vault.
• Combine the loop. From the Voltone it is thirty seconds to the Fontana del Nettuno and Salaborsa on one side and about the same to San Petronio on the other.