basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi

On Strada Maggiore, one of Bologna's oldest streets, the arcades open into a four-sided portico in front of Santa Maria dei Servi. The church was begun in 1346 for the Servants of Mary, a religious order devoted to the Virgin, and enlarged from 1386 under the Servite friar Andrea da Faenza. The portico that frames it today was completed only in 1864.

In the first chapel of the ambulatory behind the high altar hangs a panel older than the church itself, a Maestà of the enthroned Madonna and Child with two angels, painted around 1280 to 1285. It went unattributed until 1885, and most scholars now give it to Cimabue, by tradition Giotto's teacher, working with his shop. The Child reaches toward his mother and stretches one leg out through her robe, a more natural baby than the solemn miniature adults of earlier panels. A full restoration was completed in 2016.

Around the ambulatory, fragments of 14th-century fresco by Vitale da Bologna survive, and the high altar carries a marble tabernacle with the risen Christ by Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli, a sculptor who had worked alongside Michelangelo.