Biblioteca Salaborsa

A library with a hole in the floor

Salaborsa faces Piazza del Nettuno, directly across from the Neptune Fountain. The building was Bologna’s stock exchange, the Sala Borsa, and the name stuck after the city turned it into the main public library.

Walk in through the entrance on the square and you arrive in a tall covered courtyard with a glass ceiling above and a glass floor below. People are reading. Students have laptops open. Somebody’s kids are being told to keep their voices down. It works as an actual library rather than as an attraction with a library attached, and that is most of its appeal.

Then you look down.

What is under the glass

The glazed section covers roughly 400 square meters of excavation, and the layers run deep. Villanovan-era huts from the early Iron Age at the bottom. Etruscan material from Felsina, the city that stood here before Rome arrived. Above that, the Roman civil basilica of Bononia, the public building at the center of the Roman town. Then medieval house foundations and the remains of a Renaissance botanical garden laid over all of it.

Standing on the glass, you are standing on more than 2,600 years of the same few square meters being built on repeatedly. Bologna did not move; it just kept stacking.

The lighting is set up so the ruins read clearly from above, which is not always true of glass-floor sites. You do not need to go down to get the point.

One detail is worth holding onto while you look. A Roman civil basilica was the public and legal building at the middle of a town, which is broadly what the town hall next door does now. The use of this particular patch of ground has barely changed in two thousand years.

Going down into the excavations

You can walk down into the dig yourself. The library opens the archaeological area on Monday afternoons and from Tuesday to Saturday, with entry by voluntary donation and no more than 20 people inside at a time. Down there you get the Roman civil basilica of Bononia, the foundations of medieval houses on the Palazzo d’Accursio side, and remains of the sixteenth-century botanical garden of the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi. The library notes that the excavations are not accessible to wheelchair users.

For many visitors the view from the courtyard is enough, and it costs nothing. Nobody checks a ticket, nobody signs you in, and you can stay as long as you want. That is unusual for a site of this age in an Italian city center, and it is the main reason we send people here.

Biblioteca Salaborsa excavation hours

Entry to the library and the view through the glass floor are free. The excavations below run on their own timetable (Checked October 2026):

Last entry is 15 minutes before closing, and entry is “a offerta libera”, a donation of whatever you choose. These hours replace the shorter split morning and afternoon sessions the library listed earlier in 2026. The library itself keeps separate opening hours, so check bibliotecasalaborsa.it before you build a morning around it.

The wall outside

Before you go in, turn around and look at the front of the building facing Piazza del Nettuno. That is the Sacrario dei Caduti, a memorial wall carrying more than 2,000 small photographs and plaques of Bolognese partisans killed resisting the Nazi occupation between September 1943 and April 1945.

It started on its own, on 21 April 1945, the day Bologna was liberated, when women began pinning photographs and flowers of their dead to the wall on the spot where the fascist regime had shot partisans in public. Different sources give slightly different totals, in the range of just over 2,000 names. A QR code has been added in recent years so you can read individual stories.

Almost every visitor to the fountain has their back to it and never notices.

Tips

• Use it as a heat shelter. In July and August, Piazza Maggiore at two in the afternoon is punishing. Salaborsa is thirty seconds away, indoors and free.
• Go in with a coffee finished. It is a working library and food and drink are not the point.
• Look at the ceiling as well as the floor. The glazed roof over the courtyard is worth the ten seconds.
• Pair it with the clock tower at Palazzo d’Accursio next door, which is the ticketed thing on this side of the square.
• Read the Sacrario properly. Give it five minutes rather than a glance, then walk back out to the fountain. It changes the square.