Giovanni Michelucci’s concrete Church of Santa Maria Immacolata in the Italian Dolomites is a reverently uplifting memorial to the victims of a local disaster
Completed in 1983 in Longarone, in north-east Italy, two decades after a landslide destroyed the original church and surrounding village, Giovanni Michelucci’s Santa Maria Immacolata was topped in 1989 by a copper bell tower by Alessandro RedoArriving at Longarone on a slow train from Venice, zigzagging up the Piave Valley into the jagged heights of the Dolomites, the visitor is faced by a gruff modern road and, on the other side, the unresponsive façades of indifferent 1960s buildings.
Commissioned in 1966, Santa Maria Immacolata is both a parish church and a memorial to the 1,450 citizens of Longarone killed on the night of 9 October 1963 by a megatsunami caused by a landslide crashing into the nearby Vajont Dam, triggering a 250m-high wave that engulfed the town. Ahead of it, a force of air on a par with the power of a nuclear bomb hit Longarone first. The town was almost completely flattened.
Although rugged, too, Santa Maria Immacolata is, nevertheless, well crafted as a visitor should expect of a building by an architect born into an Arts and Crafts tradition. Michelucci’s family were craft metalworkers. The curving concrete seats of the internal amphitheatre, surrounding a raised marble altar, are capped with mountain fir. A handless statue of the Virgin Mary, from the pre-tsunami church – found in the Piave River miles to the south – surprises you from a votive altar.
Fragments of the town’s 18th-century Santa Maria Assunta church, which stood on the site of the current church, are gathered in a museum in the cryptUnder the patronage of a much-impressed Marcello Piacentini – Mussolini’s favourite Italian architect – Michelucci worked in Rome on the new university and on EUR, the imposing southern entrance to the city that opened in the guise of an Expo in 1942.
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