In a quiet street ten minutes from piazza Maggiore there is a piece of Spain that has been in Bologna since 1364. Cardinal Egidio Albornoz, a Spaniard in the pope's service, left money in his will to build a house where Castilian students coming to take degrees in Bologna could live and study free. The Collegio di Spagna is still there, still full of Spanish students, still run according to its founder's will and without a euro of public money: it is the oldest university college in the world open to foreign students and the only one of its kind surviving in continental Europe.
What to see
The building was put up by Matteo Gattapone, the same man who raised the fortress of Spoleto, and it has a courtyard with two orders of loggias, sober and enclosed, made to be lived in rather than looked at from outside. There is the chapel of San Clemente with its fifteenth-century altarpiece, the library, the refectory and the students' rooms; the students, now as six centuries ago, are chosen by competition in Spain and live here for the length of their studies.
The college enjoys a particular statute, with privileges of extraterritoriality, and its board still includes the archbishop of Toledo, a representative of the king of Spain and one of the former students. It is a medieval institution that has never been interrupted, and the strangest thing is that hardly anyone knows it, not even in Bologna.
Visiting
The college is on via del Collegio di Spagna, behind San Francesco; it is not a museum and has no public opening hours: it can be visited only on special occasions, open days or with permission asked for in advance. From the street you see the portal with the cardinal's arms and the windows of the courtyard. A quarter of an hour, and worth the detour anyway.
Our editors' tip
Even if the door is shut, walk the street and those around it: it is one of the quietest corners of the centre, with no shops and no tourists, low arcades and brick walls. Then check whether any open days are planned: they happen once or twice a year, and they are the only way to see the courtyard of a house where people have been studying without a break for six hundred and sixty years.