Santa Maria Assunta, Riola di Vergato

The Church of Santa Maria Assunta (Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta) is a Roman Catholic parish church in Riola, Emilia-Romagna, Italy, in the Reno valley at the foot of the northern Apennines. It was designed by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, together with Elissa Aalto and the Aalto Studio, following a commission promoted in 1965 by Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro, Archbishop of Bologna. Designed and developed between 1966 and 1980, Santa Maria Assunta was opened for worship in 1978 and completed with the construction of its free-standing bell tower in 1994. It is Aalto's only ecclesiastical building in Italy, the only Catholic church designed by the Aalto practice, and one of his very few realised works in the country. The building is noted for its asymmetrical nave, curved reinforced-concrete structural frames, controlled natural lighting and relationship with the landscape of the Reno River. Italian cultural and architectural sources have described Santa Maria Assunta as one of the most important examples of contemporary religious art and modern sacred architecture in Italy. Recent scholarship has interpreted the church not simply as a direct architectural expression of post-conciliar Catholic liturgy, but as the result of a selective engagement between the Aalto Studio, Lercaro's reformist church-building programme in Bologna and the local community of Riola.

Church data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).