Bologna is a city known for its food. Because of the cuisine, one of its nicknames is ‘the fat one’. Bologna is also known as ‘the learned one’ since it was the first European centre in medieval times to have a university. The University of Bologna boasts that it is the western world’s oldest continuously operating university
. The fundamental event in the formation of the first university was the declaration that it be a place where research could develop independently from any other power. In addition, there was a pledge to protect scholars travelling for the purpose of study from the intrusion of all political authorities. With such a history, of course I was eager to visit the University of Bologna, established in the year 1088.
I passed through the Piazza Luigi Galvani in order to visit the university’s first purpose-built home, the Archiginnasio. There, proudly looking down at the passers-by, is the figure of Luigi Galvani featuring one of his iconic dissected frogs. As I glanced up at the monument, it took me back to my university days when we still went through the process of pithing live frogs and dissecting out the gastrocnemius muscle to confirm Galvani’s discovery of a relationship between muscle twitch and electricity. The treatment of vertebrate and cephalopod organisms has improved dramatically since I was a student. These days, it would not be considered ethical to sacrifice live animals repeating a 200-year-old experiment with no chance of producing new knowledge. Current ethical considerations do not, however, reduce the valuable contributions made by Galvani in the late 18th century.