Skip to content
Kenya's death announcements & obituaries Place an announcement
Death announcements & obituaries in Kenya
Announcements
LB

DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT

LUCIA ANNA BENEDETTI

20 August 1936 – 17 April 2026

Bologna

Bologna architect and professor who taught a city to love its porticoes

'A city that shelters you from the rain is a city that loves you,' Lucia Benedetti told her first-year students, and then she walked them, in a drizzle, along the portico to San Luca, nearly four kilometres of arches climbing a hill, so that nobody could say they had not been warned.

She was born in Ferrara in 1936, the daughter of a pharmacist and a seamstress, and grew up cycling beneath another city's arcades. She studied architecture in Venice, graduating from the IUAV in 1960 when the women in the faculty could be counted on one hand, and in 1965 joined the planning office of the Comune di Bologna just as the city was deciding to do something unusual: restore its historic centre for the people who lived there rather than clear them out. Lucia was one of the planners who surveyed every building door to door, with a clipboard and a cheerful insistence on being invited in for coffee.

From 1978 until 2011 she taught urban restoration at the Università di Bologna, where she was known for her fieldwork, her short sentences and her habit of stopping mid-lecture to point out a cornice through the window. She led the Bologna section of Italia Nostra and fought for decades to protect the porticoes, the canals and the small shops beneath them. She lived long enough to see the porticoes of Bologna named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021, and celebrated with a glass of Pignoletto and a speech of four sentences.

She married Franco Maestri, an engineer, in 1963; he died in 2009. Their daughter Elena, a restorer, now lives in the family flat on Via Santo Stefano. Lucia made tortellini in brodo by hand every Christmas Eve, supported Bologna FC with despair and affection, and on her eighty-fifth birthday walked the portico to San Luca without stopping, accompanied by eleven former students who struggled to keep up.

Lucia died on 17 April 2026 at home in Bologna after a short illness, with Elena beside her and the afternoon light coming through the arches. She leaves Elena, her son Marco, four grandchildren, and a city that still shelters its people from the rain.

“A city that shelters you from the rain is a city that loves you.”

Funeral arrangements

Service
Celebration of Life
Date & time
East Africa Time (Nairobi)
Venue
Certosa di Bologna
Address
Via della Certosa 18, 40134 Bologna
Resting place
Certosa di Bologna
Google MapsAdd to calendar

Funeral committees

Family committee

Coordinating the arrangements and supporting Lucia's family.

  • chair: Elena Benedetti
  • secretary: Dr Joanna Pierce
  • treasurer: Marco Landi

Contact: Elena Benedetti

Meetings: Daily at the family home, Bologna, 5pm

≈ KES 0 raised

View committee & updates ›

Survived by

  • Daughter: Elena Benedetti
  • Son: Marco Maestri
  • Grandchildren: 4 grandchildren
  • Friend: Paola Bianchi

Life journey

  1. 1955–1960Degree in Architecture · Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV) · Venice

    One of a handful of women in her faculty.

  2. 1963Married Franco Maestri · Bologna

    A marriage of forty-six years.

  3. 1965–1985Urban planner · Comune di Bologna, Planning Office · Bologna

    Helped survey and plan the restoration of the historic centre.

  4. 1978–2011Lecturer, then Professor of Urban Restoration · Università di Bologna · Bologna

    Thirty-three years teaching students to read a city on foot.

  5. 1990–2004President, Bologna section · Italia Nostra · Bologna

    Campaigned to protect the porticoes and the canals.

  6. 1997Premio In/Arch Emilia-Romagna · Istituto Nazionale di Architettura (In/Arch) · Bologna

    For her work on the conservation of historic centres.

Condolence messages (6)

Share a memory or leave a message of comfort for the family. Please write with respect.

Sign in to send condolences

Dr Joanna Pierce

Urban historian, University of Edinburgh

Lucia hosted me for a month in 2003 and took me on the walk to San Luca in the rain. She did not slow down for me, and she did not let me slow down either. I wrote the best chapter of my book on that hill and dedicated it to her.

Paolo Neri

Student in 2009, now a city planner

On my first day she handed me a clipboard and told me to knock on every door of the street and ask residents what they would change. Eleven doors in, an old man made me a coffee and told me what the architecture could not. I am a city planner because of that coffee.

Franca Zanetti

Neighbour on Via Santo Stefano

Lucia watered my geraniums for thirty years whenever I travelled and left a note on my door each time: 'They were thirsty. So was I. Thank you for the wine.' I have forty of those notes. I keep them in the same drawer as my mother's letters.

Giulia Marchetti

Former student, now an architect in Rotterdam

She sent me back to the same building eleven times in one term. By the twelfth I could draw it from memory and had fallen in love with its drainpipes. 'You do not understand a place until you have been rained on in it,' she said. I carry an umbrella and her sentence.

Marco Landi

Italia Nostra volunteer

When developers wanted to cover the canal behind Via Piella in 1996, Lucia gathered nine hundred signatures in a fortnight, going door to door with a flask of coffee. The canal is still there, and so is the little window on Via Piella where everybody stops to look.

Prof. Matteo Orsini

Colleague, Università di Bologna

Lucia ended faculty meetings by asking whether anyone had actually walked the street we had just spent two hours discussing. Usually nobody had. The next week we would all go, with her in front, pointing out what the drawings had missed. She made planners humble.