Six of the best: Tourist-friendly university campuses

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. At a very bulky 163 metres, and 42 stories high, the Cathedral of Learning is one of those buildings that instantly captures hearts.

That's before even venturing inside, where gloomy Gothic arches recall church vaults, and the Nationality Rooms are themed on different countries. Lectures are still held in them, so a student's day might involve hopping from a recreated Swedish peasant's cottage to a mocked-up Ghanaian courtyard.

See visitpittsburgh.com and tour.pitt.edu.

UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA, ITALY

The campus of the oldest university in Europe is spread over the porticoed streets in the north-west of Bologna's city centre. Its centrepiece is the Palazzo Poggi. It's drenched in beauty – the 16th century frescos and mediaeval ceilings would be utterly gorgeous in any building – but this is 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.

See bolognawelcome.com and museopalazzopoggi.unibo.it.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY, MASSACHUSETTS

The red brick buildings of the Cambridge campus, just over the Charles River from Boston, have a rarefied old-world charm. But a tour around the Harvard campus is all about the story-telling. These 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 parent of a Titanic victim who provided the money in their will stipulated that the library's external appearance should never be changed.