Collegiate Church of San Giovanni Battista

The majestic Church of San Giovanni Battista is located in the central Piazza del Popolo and it is dedicated to the Patron saint of the town.

Around the Year 1000 there was a Lombardic church dedicated to the Saint, later rebuilt in Romanesque style with five naves right in the center of the current Piazza del Popolo just a few meters from the Municipal Palace. 

The Church was rebuilt, in a backward position in order to create the current square, between 1671 and 1698 by the bolognese architect  Paolo Maria Canali, while the inner plaster decorations were realized by the Borrelli brothers.

The Collegiata was consecrated on the 17th May 1739 by the cardinal Prospero Lambertini, future Pope Benedetto XIV, but its facade was completed a century later, in 1838, with the sculptures of the Four Evangelists by Bernardino Bernardi.

At the end of the nineteenth Century, Giovanni Battista Baldi produced the inner paintings that contributed to elevate artists of the bolognese School of painting such as Guercino, Ubaldo Gandolfi, Ercole Graziani, Francesco Albani. Recently, the intriguing altarpiece of the Fabbi brothers was reset in the apse.