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Built fast
The old university was built in under two years
Pope Pius IV commissioned the Archiginnasio to bring the schools of law and the arts together in one place. Construction began at the end of February 1562 and it was inaugurated on October 21, 1563.
Coats of arms
Six thousand painted coats of arms cover the walls
The walls form an enormous heraldic complex of six thousand coats of arms. The honor of adding one was reserved for students elected by other students as heads of the nationes, called councillors. Each shows the student's home country or city and name.
The theatre
The professor's chair rests on two skinless men
The anatomical theatre was built in 1636 by Antonio Levanti, in fir wood. The professor's seat is topped by a baldaquin and supported by the statues of two skinless men, known as gli spellati. Another statue shows Gaspare Tagliacozzi, an early pioneer of rhinoplasty.
The library
The university moved out in 1803 and a library moved in
The Archiginnasio ceased to be a university in 1803, and from 1838 the city library took its place. It was first set up to keep books collected when Napoleon closed the religious orders. It houses 850,000 volumes and pamphlets, including 2,000 incunabula.
850,000volumes and pamphlets in the library
1944
The theatre was rebuilt from the rubble after the bombing of 1944
Allied bombing on January 29, 1944 caused extensive damage to the anatomical theatre. It was reconstructed with exemplary philological rigour, using all the surviving elements retrieved from the rubble.
Day 1, afternoon
It comes after Quadrilatero market streets. Then Piazza Maggiore.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Archiginnasio of Bologna, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.