Santa Maria di Monteveglio Abbey

The church, as the columns of its crypt suggest, is one of the most ancient rural churches in the diocese of Bologna. In the middle of the 12th century, after a first hermitage, the Canons Regular of St. Fridianus from Lucca started to rebuild the structure according to the current Romanesque style.
After a decline period Santa Maria became flourishing again in 1456 thanks to the Canons Regular of the Lateran, who carried out several restoration and expansion works.

In 1628 Pope Gregory XV conferred the title of "Abbey" on the community.
For many centuries both the rural church and the Canons represented the religious, administrative and economic reference point of the present park's territory, of which they owned the great part of the farmsteads that were split and sold during the Napoleonic era.

The church and the monastery were renovated between 1924 and 1934 by Giuseppe Rivani from Bologna, further works were carried out recently.
Giuseppe Dossetti, who had withdrawn from political life, established in the isolation of Monteveglio his own community in 1961, but its final headquarters were established in Monte Sole, so that the monks went back to the abbey for the first time after the late 16th century.