The church of Santa Maria Assunta di Riola, located in the Apennines on the Porrettana road, was designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto in 1966. The church was built between 1977-78.
In the second half of the 20th century the Church was going through a period of notable turmoil, which culminated in the sixties with the celebration of the Second Vatican Council. In this important ecumenical meeting, which saw all the Catholic bishops of the world converge in Rome, emphasis was placed on the need to redefine the link between architecture and liturgy, on the basis of the complex social and cultural transformations that had germinated in the previous fifty years in Europe and who had shaped, in a anything but indifferent way, a new way in which the believer of the twentieth century related to God.
A great supporter of this new sensitivity was Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro, archbishop of Bologna from 1952 to 1968. Lercaro, in fact, also intended to provide a more modern architectural look to Italian liturgical environments. Through the animated work of the architects Giorgio Trebbi and Glauco Gresleri, for the Technical Section of the New Churches Office, this was possible, thanks to the collaboration with Alvar Aalto; architect whom he had met in November 1965 in Florence, at Palazzo Strozzi, which became the exhibition venue for an important monographic exhibition dedicated to the Finnish architect's projects.
Thus it was that Lercaro commissioned Aalto to build a Catholic religious building near Riola di Vergato, an Emilian village on the slopes of the Apennines. […….]
The executive process of the project, due to the scarcity of adequate financing, was somewhat troubled so that neither Aalto nor Lercaro managed to see the complete church: if the project was presented in Bologna on 3 December 1966, in fact, the construction site would start ten years later, in 1976, and then concluded only in 1978, when the church was inaugurated to the public and the faithful despite some incompleteness [...]
The church of Santa Maria Assunta is located in Riola di Vergato, an Emilian town on the slopes of the Apennines, on a plot bordered by the Reno river. It is the first Catholic church designed by Aalto, as well as his only Italian building intervention (leaving aside the ephemeral episode of the Finnish pavilion for the Venice Biennale, 1956) [….]
Source: Wikipedia
