Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna

Bologna had one of the most important painting schools in Italy, and this gallery, set in a former Jesuit building beside the old university quarter, tells its story in order. It runs from Gothic gold-ground panels and a Giotto polyptych through to the local masters of the 1600s.

The centre of gravity is the Carracci family and their pupils, the painters who around 1600 pushed back against Mannerist artifice toward something more direct. Their circle produced Guido Reni, and several of his large canvases hang here, including a Massacre of the Innocents.

The single most famous work is not Bolognese at all. Raphael painted his Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia around 1515 for a chapel in the city, showing the patron saint of music letting a set of pipes slip from her hands as she listens to a choir of angels. Musical instruments lie broken at her feet, earthly sound abandoned for the heavenly kind.