Madonna di San Luca, Bologna
church building in Bologna, Italy
The Sanctuary of the Madonna of San Luca is a basilica church located in Bologna, northern Italy, situated atop the forested hill of Colle (or Monte) della Guardia, approximately 300 metres above the city plain, just southwest of the historical centre.
Although a modern road leads to the sanctuary, it is more traditionally accessed via a 3.8 km-long monumental portico consisting of 666 arches, constructed between 1674 and 1793. This covered arcade, part of the Porticoes of Bologna UNESCO World Heritage Site, was originally designed to shelter the annual procession of the sacred icon of the Virgin Mary from the cathedral in central Bologna to the sanctuary. Many of the arches were originally sponsored by prominent families, and some included icons or small chapels.
History
A church or chapel existed on the hill for about a thousand years. Tradition holds that in the 12th-century, a pilgrim from the Byzantine Empire came to Bologna with an icon of the Virgin from the temple of Saint Sophia in Constantinople. In 1160, the bishop of Bologna Gerardo Grassi assigned the icon to a small hermitage-chapel atop the hill that was tended by two holy women, Azzolina and Beatrice Guezi. Construction of a church began in 1193. In 1294, some friars of the Dominican order from the monastery of Ronzano came to the site, and the order remained here until the Napoleonic suppression of 1799.
The present church was constructed in 1723 using the designs of Carlo Francesco Dotti.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Madonna di San Luca, Bologna” is church building in Bologna, Italy. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Madonna, Luca and Bologna, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “church building in Bologna, Italy” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2004104. VIAF identifies the subject as 158724534. The Library of Congress control number is nr95024475. Authority coordinates are 44.479, 11.298. 6 of 7 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1674, 1793, 1160 and 1193.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Madonna di San Luca, Bologna” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.