Bologna has a way of making even its dead look sociable. The Certosa, the monumental cemetery just north-west of the old walls, began life as a Carthusian monastery and was turned into a public burial ground at the start of the nineteenth century, when Napoleonic rules said the dead should lie outside the city. The monks' cloisters and chapels were simply adapted, and over the next two centuries families commissioned sculpture on a scale that makes the place feel like an open-air museum. Marble weeping women, family portraits in stone, scenes from daily life, and a lot of whiskered gentlemen in frock coats line long arcades.
The names are a quick tour of Bolognese pride. The poet Giosue Carducci, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906, is buried here, as is the painter Giorgio Morandi, who spent his life painting bottles and jugs in the most patient way imaginable. More recent visitors leave flowers for the songwriter Lucio Dalla. It is a quiet, shaded, gently strange place, and the porticoes are the best of it. A long covered arcade links the cemetery with the city, in the same family as the porticoes that make Bologna so walkable in the rain.
Riding in here is straightforward and a little tiresome. You reach the Certosa from the ring roads and the Via Emilia, flat and urban, with endless traffic lights and buses, and you should know that the historic centre is a limited-traffic zone with cameras, so a bike left in the wrong place can bring a fine through the post. Park outside it and walk. The city is at the foot of the Apennines, and if you want proper corners, the hills south of town are where Bolognese riders play, on roads running up towards the passes towards Tuscany. Ducati's home at Borgo Panigale is on the same side of town, and you will see its red bikes everywhere, bought, loved and ridden.
Fuel and coffee are no trouble at all in a city of this size, and nobody will rush you in a bar. Try the mortadella, the tortellini in broth, or a plain tagliatelle with the long-simmered ragu, which is nothing like what is served abroad. Autumn, with fog on the plain and warm light on the brickwork, suits the Certosa better than any other season.