Santa Maria della Carità

The painting people come to Santa Maria della Carità to see was made for a church that no longer exists. Annibale Carracci painted his Crucifixion with mourners and saints for a family chapel in San Nicolò di San Felice, the neighbouring church on the same street, and when bombing in the Second World War destroyed that building, the canvas passed through the care of Bologna's heritage office and came to rest here, in the first chapel on the left. A cleaning in the 1920s revealed the date 1583 on it. It is Annibale's earliest surviving work for a church, painted in his early twenties, plain and easy to read in the way Bologna's archbishop Gabriele Paleotti wanted sacred images to be.

The church itself stands on Via San Felice, west of the city centre. It was built in 1583 by the architect Pietro Fiorini, replacing an oratory attached to a hospice for wayfarers, and Giovanni Battista Bergonzoni enlarged it in 1680 with four side chapels.