Terrazza di San Petronio

About this audio guide

This guide to the Terrazza di San Petronio in Bologna follows a construction elevator that once carried visitors fifty-four meters up the unfinished back wall of the basilica, in groups of no more than twenty-five. You'll hear why the church, left half-dressed in bare brick since the thirteen nineties, opened that scaffolding staircase to the public in twenty fifteen and charged three euros a head, and what the view revealed of Bologna's red-tiled rooftops and the hidden market lanes below. It traces a decade of ticket sales funneled straight into repairing the stone above you.