Alvar Aalto’s only building in Italy is a church — and it’s astonishing

It all began with a gesture, almost like the laying on of hands: two open hands turned toward the village, gathering the community; then one hand cutting straight toward the valley that drops from the Apennines down to Bologna. This, they say, is how the Church of Santa Maria Assunta in Riola di Vergato was born — Alvar Aalto’s “almost” only architecture in Italy. The “almost” refers to the Finnish Pavilion at the Biennale Gardens, a temporary solution while Sverre Fehn completed the Nordic Pavilion. But the Gardens have always existed in a kind of extraterritorial UN bubble, and Aalto himself spoke of that work as a “military barrack”, despite his unshakeable affection for Venice.

Alvar Aalto, Casabella, 1964

A gesture, then, marking a before and an after.
In the “before”, there is Aalto’s long relationship with Italy, beginning with his honeymoon with Aino Marsio — his partner in all the revolutionary ventures that shaped Nordic architecture and design, including the founding of Artek. It was a relationship full of admiration but also disappointment, as many potential Italian commissions evaporated before reaching construction.

The crucial turning point of this “before” comes with no small amount of tension. And its protagonist is Catholic Italy in the wake of the Second Vatican Council — the Italy that would come looking for Aalto, hoping his heart had not been definitively broken.
Giacomo Lercaro, the cardinal of Bologna, was one of the main promoters of the Council’s liturgical reforms, calling for a church that opened itself, spatially and socially. New churches were needed, and the existing 19th-century stock felt too restrictive for him. When Lercaro visited the 1965 exhibition dedicated to Aalto at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, he made up his mind: he wanted Aalto. There was already a plot ready in Casalecchio, but Melchiorre Bega was working on it. So the choice fell on Riola, on the road up to Porretta Terme — a site where the woods, slopes and the Reno river offered all the elements needed for a project. A young architect, Masetti, stepped aside so that the master could take it on.

And that brings us to the turning point, the moment of the gesture. It is 10 January 1966, and the entire community of Riola gathers to meet Aalto. After the meeting, the gesture — and from that moment, the dense “before” of negotiations gives way to a new phase. The community later sent him a huge box, nearly 100 kg, filled with materials from the site: wood, earth, stone — all “materials with a poetic reaction.” From this comes the project we see today. The piazza is, in reality, the river itself. The churchyard descends toward the building and its large horizontal entrance, pulling the outside inward and extending the interior outward. The same osmosis — combined with Aalto’s idea of “light as a fourth dimension”, which shaped works like the Paimio Sanatorium and Villa Mairea — operates here through the indirect Nordic light. It filters in through a layered sequence of ribbon windows, defining the entire interior sky and the exterior silhouette: a fan of curved sheds creating the distinctive flat, “crested” façade.

The structure consists of large asymmetrical, curved reinforced-concrete portal frames — never, despite later claims, originally conceived in glulam wood. These frames are the only true articulation of the space, otherwise defined by white walls and terracotta floors. They also form part of the church’s relational programme: one arch is doubled so that a curtain can adjust the proportions of the space around the altar. A low partition defines a small, slightly raised choir, while the baptistery extends the building toward the river, descending gradually to meet it and framing the water through a window. It is an architecture rooted in its site but far from mimetic: its forms, the copper of the curved roof, the timber covering the outdoor transitional spaces — all express a pervasive genius loci, reinforced by the sandstone cladding quarried at nearby Montovolo, almost on site.

The “after”, following the turning point of the gesture, is no less complex than the “before”. When Lercaro resigned in 1968, the project stalled. But this is precisely when the church reveals itself as a collective endeavour. A community had formed around it — and it activated itself. There was the local community, of course; then the contractor, Grandi Lavori of Mario Tamburini, which committed to building the project pro bono — the same company that realized Le Corbusier’s Esprit Nouveau Pavilion in Bologna and Kenzo Tange’s towers at the Fair. There was the local network of designers, starting with Glauco Gresleri, who together with Leonardo Mosso forged the link between Aalto and Riola, along with Dezio Nave, who ensured continuity when the master died in 1976, and Ferdinando Forlani, who directed the construction. And there was the constant presence of Elsa Mäkiniemi — Elissa — Aalto’s second wife, ensuring that the project remained faithful to that gesture by the riverbank. 

The final piece — the promenade that was meant to descend all the way to the river — was never built, but no matter: the church opened in 1978. Other elements came later, such as the tall exposed-concrete blades of the detached bell tower, completed in 1994. 

It is a project 100 percent "signed Aalto," and at the same time 100 percent Italian, traversed as it is by the whole affair of community participation, but also by all the know-how that determined its construction, and then by the material: the sandstone of the walls comes from the nearby Montovolo quarry, practically on site.
Just as, to the sound of committees, the church had been brought to completion, now with the same tools of belonging it continues its life: in literary imaginaries, in the books of Loriano Machiavelli and Francesco Guccini, who always depict it in conversation with the eclectic-esoteric firework of the nearby Rocchetta Mattei; in contemporary rediscoveries, such as the one that generated a film in 2018, "We don't thirst for stage sets.", and the one that is promoting the recognition of the church as a cultural heritage, in support of its restoration, enhancing the work of Glauco Gresleri through its archives.

Gio Ponti, Domus 447, February 1967

If the “almost” still lingers when defining it as Aalto’s only Italian building, there is no hesitation in calling it a piece of Nordic design deep in the Apennines — a collective work that speaks Finnish, Italian and Bolognese.