Santa Maria dei Servi

Along Strada Maggiore, the four-tiered portico of Santa Maria dei Servi fronts a Gothic basilica of the Servite order, with a thirteenth-century Madonna attributed to Cimabue and canvases by seventeenth-century Bolognese masters.

Why it matters

Bologna's porticoes usually serve the street; here the portico serves a church, and the result is a theatrical facade in front of a deliberately plain one. The basilica grew with the Servites of Mary, whose presence on this stretch of Strada Maggiore the city's porticoes portal documents from the early years of their arrival, and the rebuilding of the church is credited by the civic history archive to friar Andrea Manfredi da Faenza, working with master Antonio di Vincenzo, the architect already engaged on San Petronio. The basilica is the sum of that ambition: a broad quadriportico begun in 1393 and completed over five centuries, before a Gothic hall whose brick geometry is among the best preserved in the city. It closes the axis of Strada Maggiore, a principal medieval street of Bologna.

What to notice

The portico's layered tiers of arches rise from the narrow street, with thick stone piers below and slender bays above. The Comune granted the Servites the ground in 1392; construction began the following year, and the frontal quadriportico was completed over subsequent centuries. The Gothic interior has tall nave arcades and brick vaults, with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lunette frescoes by Bolognese painters including Alessandro Mari and Carlo Cignani. The thirteenth-century enthroned Madonna is attributed to Cimabue; side chapels hold paintings by Crespi, Albani and Calvaert.

Context and history

The Servite friars, an order founded in thirteenth-century Tuscany, established themselves in Bologna and rebuilt their church in the fourteenth century, the campaign that the civic archive dates to 1382 under Manfredi da Faenza's design; his partnership with Antonio di Vincenzo links the basilica to the same workshop as the giant of San Petronio rising nearby. The portico campaign followed in the 1390s, and its completion became a multigenerational affair: sources describe the frontal quadriportico as finished from the late nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth, echoing the design logic of the original side portico. The basilica's interior accumulated paintings accordingly, the lunettes of the vaults painted between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by a roster the archive enumerates, and the building entered the twentieth century as a fixture of the street's identity. Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed scenes of Edipo Re under the portico. The UNESCO inscription of Bologna's porticoes includes the church's portico and quadriportico in the Strada Maggiore component.