Via Ugo Bassi

Wide porticos run along the southern side, created after the street's major rebuilding: under the Fascist regime, the city purchased and demolished old houses here. An art historian warned that medieval arches, brick portals, passageways, and courtyards would disappear with them, but the work continued. Most of the new buildings were constructed to the design of the engineer Paolo Graziani, while the facade of the former Mint was dismantled and moved to Piazza Roosevelt.

Today's Via Ugo Bassi looks like a single broad commercial corridor. For a long time, no such street existed. In January eighteen sixty-nine, city councilors joined together three separate stretches. Near Piazza Nettuno were the Poultry Sellers' Turns, farther on came Carters' Street, and the western section was considered part of Via San Felice. The old names arose from everyday activities: poultry was sold here, carriages and horses were hired, and travelers were received in inns. The councilors replaced them with the name of a man shot in Bologna twenty years earlier.

Ugo Bassi was a Barnabite priest, a member of a Catholic religious order. Before the revolution, he taught and traveled through Italian cities delivering Lenten sermons. In April eighteen forty-eight, Bassi was preaching in Ancona when volunteers set out from there to fight the Austrian army. He interrupted his usual work and went with them as a military chaplain.

This decision put his position in the order at risk. After being wounded at Treviso, Bassi joined Giuseppe Garibaldi and became the priest of Garibaldi's legion, which defended the republic proclaimed in Rome. The order's leaders obtained a document removing Bassi from the religious congregation, but Bassi himself did not receive the document and considered himself a Barnabite to the end.

After the fall of the republic, Bassi retreated with Garibaldi toward Venice. Near Comacchio, he was captured together with Captain Giovanni Livraghi and brought to Bologna. The Austrian military conducted a summary proceeding. Representatives of the local clergy objected: a soldiers' court had no right to try a priest. The objection had no effect. On August eighth, eighteen forty-nine, Bassi and Livraghi were shot at Portico della Certosa, near Meloncello.

City residents began coming to Bassi's grave. To keep it from becoming a place of worship, the Austrian command ordered the body dug up at night and hidden in an unmarked grave in the cemetery. Only after Austrian troops left Bologna in eighteen fifty-nine did relatives find the remains and bury them in the family tomb. Ten years later, the surname of the executed priest replaced the names of merchants and carters here. The bronze figure at the intersection with Via Nazario Sauro shows Bassi with his hand raised, in his familiar pose as a preacher.

Other people created the street's width. In nineteen twenty-seven, under the Fascist regime, municipal officials began compulsorily purchasing houses and demolishing mainly the southern side. The art historian Francesco Malaguzzi Valeri publicly warned of the destruction of medieval houses, pointed arches, brick portals, passageways, and courtyards. His protest did not stop the work.

The engineer Paolo Graziani designed most of the new buildings. On the last day of nineteen twenty-nine, the porticos of the final three houses were opened, and the municipal journal presented the widened street to city residents as a New Year's gift. The facade of the old Mint was preserved: it was dismantled and moved to present-day Piazza Roosevelt. A row of Graziani's houses stands on the facade's former site.