Cattedrale di San Pietro

Bologna's cathedral is easy to miss beside its giant neighbour San Petronio, yet it is the archbishop's church and the older institution. Behind an eighteenth-century facade lie Alfonso Lombardi's quiet terracotta Lamentation, canvases of the early Baroque, a treasury gathered by a Bologna-born pope, and a bell tower second only to the Asinelli in height.

Why it matters

A church of San Pietro stood on this site by the tenth century, and when Pope Gregory XIII — himself a Bolognese — raised the diocese to an archdiocese in 1582, the building became the metropolitan cathedral of Emilia's principal see. The reconstruction of 1605 swept away every visible trace of the original Romanesque-Gothic fabric, so what you visit today is a statement of Counter-Reformation order: a long aisleless nave lined with large altarpieces, spacious side chapels and a crypt. Where San Petronio belongs to the commune, the Duomo belongs to the Church, and the difference explains its calmer, more hierarchical interior.

What to notice

The first chapel on the right, the Albergati chapel, holds the cathedral's most admired work: the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in polychrome terracotta by the Ferrarese sculptor Alfonso Lombardi, made around 1518-1526 for the Benedictine nuns of Santa Margherita and given to the cathedral in 1584. Compared with Niccolò dell'Arca's agonised group at Santa Maria della Vita, Lombardi's grief is measured and composed, which is why scholars long debated its attribution. Nineteenth-century whitewash that disguised the group as marble was removed in the 1910 restoration.

Walk the nave for the paintings: Prospero Fontana, Ludovico Carracci and Donato Creti are all represented on the altars, a survey of Bolognese painting across the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The medieval marble ciborium rises over the high altar, a survivor from before the Baroque remake. Do not skip the treasury, assembled largely from the gifts of Prospero Lambertini, Pope Benedict XIV, Bologna's own pope, with fourteenth-century vestments and the Spanish silver-and-gold chasuble given by Gregory XV in 1622.

Context and history

The 1605 rebuilding fixed the cathedral's present character, and its decoration unfolded across the following two centuries. The sculptural programme, the altarpieces and the crypt arrangements were repeatedly re-thought; the Lamentation itself moved from the crypt to its present chapel only in 1992. The treasury museum rooms opened for the Jubilee of 2000, gathering vestments and goldsmith's work from the cathedral's stores, among them pieces linked to Bishop Nicolò Albergati in the fifteenth century and Roman works presented by Benedict XIV in 1750. An archaeological area in the crypt reveals the older church layers.