L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 10 L'Italo-Americano J ust outside the old walls of Bologna, a covered walkway s e t s o f f u p a h i l l and does not stop; it runs for almost two and a half miles, climbing all the way to a church on a ridge some thousand feet above the c i t y , a n d a l o n g i t s e n t i r e length it is roofed, arched, and unbroken: six hundred and sixty-six arches, one after another, marching up the slope in a great brick serpent. It is the longest portico in the world, and the strangest thing about it is the reason it exists. The whole colossal corridor was built, in the end, to keep a single small paint- ing out of the rain. To understand that, you f i r s t h a v e t o u n d e r s t a n d Bologna, because no other city on Earth is so devoted to the idea of portici. The Bolog- nesi have been building cov- e r e d a r c a d e s o v e r t h e i r streets since the early Middle Ages, and today the city has something on the order of forty miles of them, roughly twenty-six in the historic cen- ter alone. They are so central to what Bologna is that in 2021 UNESCO placed the porticoes on its World Her- itage list, an honor usually reserved for a cathedral or a ruin, not for a way of getting down the street without an umbrella. They began, as good things often do, by accident. Bologna is home to the oldest university in the West- ern world, founded in 1088, and from the start it drew students and scholars from across Europe in numbers the city could not house. To make room, owners began pushing the upper floors of their buildings out over the street, propping the overhang o n b e a m s a n d , l a t e r , o n c o l u m n s a n d a r c h e s , a n d gaining a whole extra room upstairs while the public kept the covered path below. The city liked the result so much that in 1288 it made porti- coes the law : every new house had to have one, and older houses that lacked one were ordered to build it, tall enough, the statute said, for a man on horseback to ride through. Since then, they have been the city's covered living room, where people walk, talk, court, shop, and take refuge from the sun and the rain. The portico that climbs to San Luca is the grandest of them all, and very pur- poseful, too. It leaves the city at the Porta Saragozza, one of the medieval gates, and heads for the Colle della Guardia, the green hill that r i s e s o v e r B o l o g n a t o t h e southwest, crowned by the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca. The first stretch runs level along the streets, then the walkway reaches the Meloncello, an elegant, curv- ing arch built in the 1720s by the architect Carlo Francesco Dotti so the portico could l e a p o v e r a b u s y r o a d . Beyond the Meloncello the real climb begins, the arcade winding up the hillside in long switchbacks, punctuat- ed along the way by fifteen small chapels, each painted with one of the Mysteries of the Rosary, so that the walk up doubles as a prayer count- ed off arch by arch. The arches themselves are nothing short of legendary, as there are 666 of them – 666, like the number associ- ated in Scripture with the B e a s t – a n d a c c o r d i n g t o local tradition, this was no accident. Seen from a dis- tance, the portico winds up the hill like a serpent, and its 666 arches are said to sym- bolize the Madonna crushing the snake beneath her feet, a traditional image of her vic- tory over the Devil. Because the Portico of San Luca remains, first and fore- most, an act of devotion, and this is where the painting we mentioned enters the pic- ture. Inside the sanctuary hangs a Byzantine icon of the Madonna and Child, attributed by long tradition to Saint Luke the Evangelist himself. Dark and ancient, s i n c e 1 4 3 3 , t h e i c o n h a s m a d e a n a n n u a l j o u r n e y : every spring, in the week of the Ascension, it is carried down from the hill, through the city, to the cathedral of San Pietro (not to be mistak- e n w i t h i t s p e r h a p s m o r e famous cousin, the Basilica di San Petronio, in Piazza Maggiore) and then carried back up again. The custom was born, the story goes, in a year when relentless rain was r o t t i n g t h e c r o p s i n t h e f i e l d s , a n d t h e p e o p l e brought the icon down in d e s p e r a t i o n ; t h e r a i n stopped as it entered the city, a n d a g r a t e f u l B o l o g n a vowed to repeat the proces- sion every year thereafter. It has kept that vow for nearly six centuries. A procession that impor- tant needed shelter, and car- rying a fragile, sacred paint- ing for miles through the u n p r e d i c t a b l e E m i l i a n weather was asking for disas- ter, so, beginning in 1674 and continuing until 1793, the Bolognesi built it a roof, arch by arch, until the icon could travel from the sanctuary to the city gate and never once feel a drop of rain. But what moves us the most is, per- haps, how it was paid for, because there was no single royal purse behind it: all the money came from the people t h e m s e l v e s , f r o m d e v o u t families, from the artisan guilds, from confraternities, e a c h b u y i n g a n a r c h o r a s t r e t c h o f a r c h e s , t h e i r n a m e s a n d c o a t s o f a r m s worked into the stone. For instance, the grand Melon- cello arch itself was financed by the Monti Bendini family. The longest portico on earth is, quite literally, a whole city's faith laid end to end. Still today, every spring the icon makes its journey down the covered road and b a c k , w a t c h e d b y c r o w d s who have known the ritual all their lives; but on any ordinary morning the portico belongs to everyone else: pil- grims climbing on foot as an act of penance or thanks, stu- dents jogging up for the exer- cise, old couples taking the shaded path slowly, families out for the view, which at the t o p o p e n s a c r o s s t h e r e d roofs of Bologna to the whole Po plain beyond it. If you don't feel like walking, you can always take the car to enjoy the view, as San Luca is only a 10-minute drive from the city center, but almost nobody who cares about the place would dream of it. The point is (and it has always been) the walk up through the arches, the way it has been made for three and a half centuries, under a roof a whole city built to keep the rain off a painting it loved. 666 arches up a hill: Bologna's Portico di San Luca CHIARA D'ALESSIO ALL AROUND ITALY TRAVEL TIPS DESTINATIONS ACTIVITIES The covered climb to San Luca is punctuated by chapels dedicated to the Mysteries of the Rosary, reflecting the portico's origins as a pilgrimage route (Photo: Stefano Carnevali/Dreamstime)

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