Many university campuses around the world have impressive buildings, but these five unis have something genuinely extraordinary about them. They’re tourist attractions in their own right.
Oxford University, England
The University of Oxford has pretty much the complete package, with gloriously scenic grounds, unusual buildings and world class museums on site. Christ Church is both the local cathedral and a university college in its own right – although Harry Potter fans will be more likely to recognise the Great Hall, which was replicated for the Hogwarts version in the films.
For the more culturally curious, the Ashmolean Museum has a tremendous art collection, plus plenty of weird oddities like Oliver Cromwell’s death mask and the lantern Guy Fawkes was holding as he went off to blow up parliament. The Pitt Rivers Museum, meanwhile, is an anthropological and archaeological treasure trove. It’s next to the Museum of Natural History.
University of Coimbra, Portugal
Portugal’s version of Oxford is Coimbra, where the university has been going since 1290. Installed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list, it has the massive advantage of occupying a former royal palace complex. That means lavishly decadent chapels, swoony cloistered courtyards, grand staircases lined with tile art and a blissfully peaceful botanic garden.
Highlights tours are available at 11am and 3pm every day, and yet again the library is the stand-out. The Joanine Library is a magnificently OTT feast of baroque chutzpah – something probably wasted on today’s students.
University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
You can hardly miss the University of Pittsburgh’s main building – it’s an utterly incongruous neo-Gothic monster that soars above everything around it in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At a very bulky 163m and 42 stories high, the Cathedral of Learning is one of those buildings that instantly captures most hearts.
That’s before even venturing inside, where gloomy Gothic arches remind of church vaults and the Nationality Rooms are all themed on a different country. Lectures are still held in them – so one day might involve hopping from a recreated Swedish peasant’s cottage to a mocked-up Ghanaian courtyard.
University of Bologna, Italy
The oldest university in Europe has its campus spread across the porticoed streets in the north-west of Bologna’s city centre. The centrepiece of the University of Bologna, however, is the Palazzo Poggi – one of the attractions that make Bologna the most underrated city in Italy.
It’s drenched in beauty – the 16th century frescos and medieval ceilings would be utterly gorgeous in any building – but this in jarring contrast to the university museum collections inside it. The natural history and physics collections are endearingly odd, but the rooms packed with thousands of lifelike anatomical waxworks are like something from a particularly unhinged nightmare. Especially the one lined with glass cabinets containing model uterus after model uterus.
Harvard University, Massachusetts
The red brick buildings of the Harvard campus are found in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just over the Charles River from Boston. They have a rarefied old world charm. But a tour around the Harvard campus is all about the story-telling.
These tales include the statue of the “three lies” – it bears no resemblance to the real John Harvard, Harvard didn’t found the university and it wasn’t founded in 1638. There are also tales of high level pranks, daring student journalism and ridiculous bequests.
The Widener Library, for example, had to build miles of shelving underground as the mother of the Titanic victim who provided the money in his will stipulated that the external appearance should never be changed.
More university travel
Other fascinating university buildings covered on Planet Whitley include the Palazzo Bo in Padua, the Polar Museum in Cambridge, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven and the Rylands Library in Manchester.
