HISTORY
The Abbey of Marola was built between 1076 and 1092 under the patronage of the Countess Matilda of Canossa, as a demonstration of her gratitude to the hermit Giovanni of Marola, who encouraged her to pursue the fight against the emperor Henry IV. In the seventeenth century, it was transformed into a fortified residence, and in 1747 it underwent a radical Baroque restructuring that completely altered the building's original appearance, particularly the façade, and added the transept and dome. The church was closed in the Napoleonic period, and after the Restoration was turned into a seminary. Restorations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries imposed a return to the church’s Romanesque past.

ART-HISTORICAL NOTES
The sober façade of the church is adorned with a stone portal, flanked by semi-columns and chiseled interlace capitals. The church is a three-aisled basilica, without a transept, containing five bays on a round-arch arcade. The first two supports are cylindrical columns, while the rest are rectangular piers. The aisles are covered with a wood roof, and the presbytery, which occupies the fifth bay, has a barrel vault. There is but one original Corinthian capital on the interior, carved with leaves in relief and elegant volutes on the angles. The other capitals are the clear work of modern restorations but a few Romanesque fragments were preserved in the Seminary’s lapidarium. Among these, a particularly interesting capital records the total eclipse of the sun in 1239 in an etched graffito.