Bologna's Football Cathedral Is a Layer Cake of Contradictions
It's a fascist monument that's beloved in a lefty town, and soon it will be transformed once more.
I made the mistake of getting in the concessions line about five minutes into the second half, thinking I could dodge the halftime crowds and get myself a plastic cup of beer — OK, two — without missing much. And then came the roar.
Dashing out to the concrete landing two thirds of the way up the stand, I arrived just in time to witness a festival of passion, skyward fist pumps and cries of “Dai!” all around, and two men — one to the left, one to the right — who’d clambered up onto the piped railings in front of them to howl their approval. The one on the left had torn off his shirt. Bologna FC 1909 had just equalized in a critical match with Juventus to determine who would play Champions League football next season. Now, if Bologna could get another, they’d leapfrog the Old Lady and find themselves in pole position with three matches left to play in Serie A.
From high up in the “Distinti” stand, to the left of the famous tower lodged in it that sets the Stadio Renato Dall’Ara apart, the sound seemed to erupt upward volcanically from the three open-top grandstands: the Curva San Luca to the left; the Curva Bulgarelli to the right, past the tower; and Distinti. Only the Tribuna on the far side, with its owners’ boxes and hospitality seating, is covered with a roof.
Off diagonally to the left, the away support was packed into a narrow section between the Curva San Luca and the Tribuna, and the black-and-whites of Juve were making a right old racket throughout, a constant drumbeat across the 90 minutes that occasionally gave way to soaring choirs of defiant voices singing as one. They were well-marshaled, relentless, proud. Tricky times these may be for the club, but this is still Juventus: 36 times champions of Italy, 15-time Coppa Italia winners, the regal zebras of the peninsula.
They were loud indeed, but in the big moments they were matched by the Curva Bulgarelli. This stand is home to the ultras, an array of groups that includes the Vecchia Guardia — “The Old Guard” — and they had enough flares going to reassure you that you were, indeed, watching Serie A. I was too far away to hear for myself, but I was told they act as conductors for the whole stadium’s orchestra: “Just the Curva, just the Curva,” they might say to give their section a solo. Then: “Tutto il Stadio!” In April, after he laced in a scissor kick deep in stoppage time to defeat top-of-the-table Inter Milan, Bologna forward Riccardo Orsolini jumped all kinds of obstacles to celebrate in front of this stand as the stadium exploded. Even with a six-lane running track ringing the pitch and keeping supporters at a distance, the place gets thunderous.
“The energy of the last couple seasons, it's gorgeous,” said Marco Graziani, who sits with the ultras in the Bulgarelli. Well, he calls it something else. More on that later. But these are fine times for Bologna, glorious even.
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This is a serious institution of Italian football, a club that’s won Serie A on seven occasions, but not recently. Most of those Scudetti arrived in the 1930s, and they haven’t won the league since 1964. From the Roaring Twenties to the Second World War, though, Bologna was a club to be feared. They were the first Italian team to win an international tournament in 1937, trouncing Chelsea 4-1 in the Tournoi de Paris final, and they won four out of six league titles between 1936 and 1941. Those were the glory days of Renato Dall’Ara, the local entrepreneur from humble beginnings who came to lead Bologna to all that glory, and whose name now adorns their stadium. They were known as “lo squadrone che tremare il mondo fa” — “the team that makes the world tremble.”
In 1964, Dall’Ara dropped dead during a meeting at league headquarters with his Inter Milan counterpart Angelo Moratti just days before the two teams were to meet in a championship playoff. Bologna won it, but since then, the Milan clubs and Juventus have claimed the titles for the most part.
Bologna began to drift closer to Pro Vercelli — the long-lost dominant force from the earliest days of Italian football — and away from the corridors of power. They’ve been relegated to Serie B twice in the last two decades alone. When I went to see them at the beginning of May, they hadn’t won any trophy in 51 years1. Their last was the 1973 Coppa Italia, though they’d just reached the final of the 2025 edition of that same competition and had a date with A.C. Milan in Rome later in the month.
First, though, they had to meet Juventus at the Dall’Ara and try to get themselves into the Champions League for a second consecutive season. A stunning showing in 2023/24 under head coach Thiago Motta set them up to play in Europe’s highest-level competition this season. It meant a trip to Anfield this fall to face Liverpool. It meant hanging with the big boys again. There were raucous celebrations in the city center last May.
But then Motta jumped ship for Juventus in the summer, and Vincenzo Italiano took over. Some rough results in the first half of the season did not set them up well, but in February they started cranking out the points. They defeated Atalanta and Inter, drew with eventual champions Napoli, and started climbing up the table towards the Top Four. Now they just had to get past Juve — who’d long since fired Motta to extinguish that subplot — in a stadium unlike any other, one the Rossoblù will soon vacate so it can be transformed.
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Like any city with ancient roots, Bologna has its layers. It’s been invaded a lot. It was Etruscan, then some Celtic tribes got hold of it, then it was taken by the Romans. The latter’s first order of business when conquering a new chunk of territory was to build a big road through it, and when they took this area of northern Italy around 189 BC, they built the Via Aemilia. It lends this modern region of Emilia-Romagna its name.
There are a great many towns along the ancient highway, among them Parma and Modena and Reggio Emilia, birthplace of Renato Dall’Ara. But Bologna is the capital of this territory, because after it changed hands a few more times — it was repeatedly sacked by the Goths and controlled for longer by the Lombards — Charlemagne came to town by request of Pope Adrian I at the dawn of the Middle Ages. The Frankish king sorted those Lombards out and seized control of what’s now northern Italy in an important step on his path to becoming what would later be known as “Holy Roman Emperor.”
Many of his successors spent time fighting for control of this area with subsequent popes who were less pleased with the whole power dynamic. Bologna’s noble families chose sides in these perennial disputes, lining up as “Guelfs” and “Ghibellines,” all while the city was rising to become one of the most important in medieval Europe. These families built soaring stone towers for defense and to display their wealth and power, the world’s first skyscrapers, and some of them still stand today in a city center that is remarkably preserved. Most of these torri date from the 12th century, not long after the University of Bologna — the world’s oldest — opened its doors.
“Bologna is a university city,” says Olivio Romanini, the caporedattore — editor-in-chief — of the Corriere di Bologna. “It’s one million people in the metropolitan area, but it’s bigger, it’s more [than that].” It attracts students from all over Italy and the world.
“That gives us a good energy,” Graziani said, “new ideas, new people, movements, music, literature, cinema, art.”
It’s also a crossroads: “It’s in a position [on the peninsula] where everyone passes through Bologna to go to the North, or to the South,” Romanini said. If all roads lead to Rome, they go through Bologna. Many northern cities (outside of Milan) are fairly sleepy, but not this one. “It’s the Napoli of the north. It’s not a boring city,” he said.
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This story is part of the CATHEDRALS series covering the world’s great stadiums. Check out the features on Goodison Park and Anfield:
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Most of all, though, it’s where so many epochs meet, chiefly the medieval and the modern. The stone streets and sweeping palazzos and giant timber beams supporting 800-year-old bricks are a time machine to the days of dukes, fiefdoms, warrior popes, and yes, serfs. Apart from the towers, the most distinctive feature of this medieval world are the portici, the porticoes that line nearly every building in sight — even some from the modern era — that have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site for the singular character they offer the city.
The most famous are the portici of San Luca, nearly four kilometers of patterned stone archway that climb up a hill to the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca, just southwest of the city center. And at the foot of the hill, built into the porticoes as they pass on by, is the Stadio Renato Dall’Ara. Because those that built the stadium had a very clear idea of what they’d like to connect it to.
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Before kickoff, supporters might get a beer at Pub Number Ten on the Via Emilia, or at Bar Dalla on the Via Andrea Costa quite a bit closer to the ground. They might also get a bite in what is, after all, the Italian gastrocapital. “If the match is in the afternoon, we will get a plate of tortellini,” Romanini said. Others might get a drink or something to eat at one of the street trucks on the blocks adjacent to the stadium.
There, crowds of blue-and-red-clad men smoked cigarettes and vapes in loose circles with the sky blue-and-yellow metalwork of the stadium exterior rising up behind them as the sun slid down. The minutes ticked away, and the crowds started funneling towards the gates. I joined the parade down the Via Pietro de Coubertin towards the Torre di Maratona and Distinti. In front of the tower, you’ll find the famous rows (and rows) of motorbikes from the pictures, and on either side, people line up in the porticoes to get their tickets scanned and enter.
Inside, there are cavernous, barrel-vault brick ceilings high above the crowd of Felsinei traveling in all directions. I picked my way through, choosing to head towards the field first and up the stands. I passed groups of three or four greeting each other jovially on the concrete staircases before I found my seat near the top. There was a buzz around the place, Bologna fans and undercover Juve partisans chatting excitedly ahead of a very big game. Two young kids next to me in Bologna hats gesticulated wildly as the announcer read the lineups. And then, soon enough, the pageantry began. The club anthem, “Le Tue Ali Bologna” — “Your Wings, Bologna” — rang out, and plenty sang along lustily as, out in the distance, the flares burned red in the Curva Bulgarelli.
“Bulgarelli” refers to Giacomo, the legendary midfielder born in the commune of Medicina outside Bologna who played his whole career for the club. He served this institution for 16 years and captained Bologna to the Scudetto in 1963-64. He still holds the club record for appearances with 470, and now his name is immortalized on the Curva. But Graziani doesn’t call it the Bulgarelli.
“Andrea Costa was one of the first sindicalisti” — trade unionists — “in Italy,” he said. “He born in Imola, a few kilometers outside Bologna” along the Via Emilia. Now his name’s on another road, one that runs west from the city center and past the Stadio Renato Dall’Ara, behind the stand where Marco and the ultras sit. “For anyone old enough to remember, it’s the Curva Andrea Costa,” he said. “The Old Guard says Curva Andrea Costa. It's something you can’t change. It stays with us.”
Costa was one of the founders of the Italian socialist movement, having begun his political life as an anarchist and a genuine revolutionary. While he was imprisoned for a failed insurrection amid the financial meltdown following the Panic of 1873, he remade his philosophy and gravitated towards legal means, eventually winning election as Italy’s first socialist parliamentarian. He remained a staunch advocate for strike actions and trade unions, though, and became a national labor leader. 115 years after his death in 1910, Costa is still central to this town’s narrative.
“Bologna is basically a left-wing city,” Romanini said. “For years, it was the capital of the Italian left2. It is called, ‘The Fat, the Learned, and the Red,’ and therefore it’s a contradiction that its stadium is of fascist origin.”
The Stadio Renato Dall’Ara was initially known as the “Littoriale,” as in “fascio littorio,” referring to the symbol of ancient Roman judicial authority that was adopted by Benito Mussolini and the National Fascist Party. The stadium was a project of Leandro Arpinati, one of Mussolini’s earliest political collaborators who led one of the first fascist paramilitary squads in an attack on socialists and others in and around Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore. It was known as “the strage” — massacre — “of the Palazzo d’Accursio.” Arpinati was elevated to the party hierarchy after the March on Rome in 1922, and he became (among other things) mayor of Bologna and president of the Italian football federation. But the Littoriale was part of a grand multi-purpose sporting complex that also included tennis courts and swimming pools, and some of those facilities are still there today.
The project was such a priority for the party that King Victor Emmanuel III visited in 1925 to mark the laying of the initial foundations, and Mussolini came to town on a white horse in 1926 to inaugurate the stadium. (Bologna did not start playing football matches there until the following year.) The next day, Il Duce was celebrating the fourth anniversary of his rise to power with a parade through the city center when a 15-year-old named Anteo Zamboni was accused of trying to assassinate him. The attempt did not succeed, and the teenager was promptly lynched by the squadristi led by Arpinati, though there’s still a street nearby the site — the Via Zamboni — named after him.
“The first day of life of the Dall’Ara stadium is the day with the shot,” Romanini said. But Mussolini survived, and his reign as dictator was a glorious time for Bologna. They won six of their seven league titles, two of them under head coach Árpád Weisz, a Hungarian Jew who was forced to flee the country for the Netherlands with his wife and two children following the enactment of the Italian Racial Laws in 1938. In 1944, they were captured by the Nazis, and all four were murdered at Auschwitz. The Curva San Luca at the Dall’Ara was formally renamed in his honor in 2018.
But long before that, in Bologna’s heyday, there was a statue of Mussolini on horseback commissioned to commemorate his visit that was placed in the stadium’s tower. It stood until he was deposed in 1943, when it was torn down and the ground was renamed the Stadio Comunale. But the tower remains, hooked into the portici that link Bologna to its medieval past, just as The Leader and his lieutenants intended.
Much like the Via dell'Impero that he built to connect the Monumento Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome to the Coliseum and all the ancient empire’s glories, so was this grand building fused to Bologna’s heavyweight history. The Littoriale had design elements cribbed from the Coliseum, too, with the rows of archways ringing the exterior at each level. The intent was clear: to build a monument to physical strength and hardened beauty that was worthy of what these dark and wicked men thought would be just the latest period of civilizational greatness on the Italian peninsula.
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It was not a scene of greatness after nine minutes, when Bologna left Juve’s Khéphren Thuram in far too much space at the top of the box and he struck low and hard under the keeper, Łukasz Skorupski, who did not cover himself in glory. The stadium groaned as the ball nestled in the net, and a blanket of angst fell on the place. Then the Rossoblù found their way back into it and the Dall’Ara was rocking again, scarves waving overhead as the faithful howled their approval, but it won’t be rocking quite the same for a while. It’s about to close. Canadian owner Joey Saputo took over Bologna in 2014 and transformed the club, and soon this masterwork of layered contradictions will have its own transformation.
It won’t be the first for Bologna’s facilities. The club began life at the Piazza d’Armi across town and won a league title there, but were asked to leave by their landlord — the Italian government — reportedly because a local shepherd was unhappy: the field was where he grazed his flock. Next it was the Stadio Sterlino, but among other issues, the pitch was on a slope (like Tamworth!) where one goal was at significantly higher elevation than the other. Then they got into what’s now known as the Dall’Ara, which at the time could hold more than 50,000 spectators, and it was a rollicking venue that hosted matches at the 1934 World Cup, which Italy won.
Even then, though, the change kept coming. Ahead of another World Cup in 1990, a layer of seats were added, and so was the now iconic multicolor metal scaffold that hugs the stadium. Over time, the capacity was reduced to the current 36,000 or so, and the gigantic, soaring floodlights were introduced in each of the four corners.
Now the ground will begin its latest evolution when a new round of renovations begin. They were slated for this summer, though things haven’t quite come together in time for that. When they do, the team will move out and play matches at a temporary venue east of the city for the next two seasons. That outer layer of metal piping will be stripped off just as it was once fastened on for Italia ‘90. The old brick Romanesque heart of the place will be exposed again, and a futuresque semi-transparent white roof will be fixed on top to cover the currently exposed stands, which in turn will be knocked down and moved forward. The running track will be gone, and fans will be much, much closer to the pitch.
Not everybody is on board, but Graziani is. “I feel that the track is completely useless, and it's not enjoyable for us. I agree with the project to take it off,” he said. “We are far from what happens on the field. And yeah, I agree with the project to cover the stands, because, come on, we are in the Champions League. Cover the stand. In Ferrara, Serie C, SPAL — they’ve got a covered stand. Why doesn't Bologna? When it's raining, we get wet.”
It’s all part of the master plan for Saputo, a Canadian food magnate who became the club’s majority shareholder in 2014 when Bologna was mired in Serie B. He promised to change things, and he has.
“He’s Italian-Canadian,” Marco said. “His father is from Calabria. He also gives us new energy, new ideas. Less provincial, and more open to the world.” He cited the major work on the club academy and its facilities, and a shift in transfer policy towards youth recruitment that accepts Bologna’s place in the global football ecosystem. “Obviously, sometimes someone's got to be sold,” Graziani said, like Joshua Zirkzee or Riccardo Calafiori last summer, but “they keep investing in good players like [Benjamin] Dominguez, like [Santiago] Castro, like [Sam] Beukema.” These players are pitched on the development project at Bologna, the opportunity to play and grow and (often) move on to a higher level.
“This energy comes back to the team and the crowd, with the tifos, the supporters singing, clapping,” says Graziani, who’s been a fan for 30 years — minus a rough patch following Calciopoli, when he fell out of love with football — and a season ticket holder for 10. “It’s an energy that takes so many years to get in this stage of Bologna’s history, but we are here. We got to this point because we're looking forward now, over the borders, for young people, willing people, people that want to play. We don't want players like, I don't know, [Rafael] Leao of Milan, who collapse on the field, shouting they are dying. We want players with the eye of the tiger, who want to explode and show their ability. And so far, it works.”
It has indeed, though my Sunday night at the Dall’Ara didn’t go quite as the locals planned. There were chances for both sides, but Bologna couldn’t find a way past Juventus — not on the night, and not in the crucial month of May. (“FORZA BOLOGNA and juveMERDA,” Graziani texted me after the game.) They did not qualify for the Champions League in the end, but they found glory elsewhere.
On the 14th, they went down to the Stadio Olimpico in Rome and defeated A.C. Milan 1-0 to claim their first major trophy in half a century. The celebrations in Bologna’s city center afterwards rivaled their Champions League qualification party a year earlier, and they continued into the next home game at the Stadio Renato Dall’Ara. Graziani sent me pictures from his seat at the top of the Curva, where he believes the crowd can draw something different out of the players, get them to play “con il sangue negli occhi, with blood in the eyes.” Just imagine when the fans are closer to the pitch.⚽︎
Bologna won the Intertoto Cup in 1998, but everyone seems to have agreed that this was not a real tournament. It was possibly a figment of our collective imagination.
If you look closely at that video of Orsolini’s winner against Inter, you’ll see a Bologna flag in the Bulgarelli with “FREAK BOYS” superimposed on a giant marijuana leaf.
Wow, this is the good stuff. The weaving of the culture, history and future of Bologna was so well done 👏