The Basilica della Ghiara is Reggio Emilia's most theatrically beautiful church, a late-Renaissance and early Baroque masterpiece built between 1597 and 1619 on the site of a miraculous image. The exterior is pleasingly simple — a domed rotunda with a restrained facade — but the interior is extraordinary: every inch covered with seventeenth-century frescoes by the leading painters of Emilia-Romagna, most notably Ludovico Carracci and Alessandro Tiarini.
The church was built to house a miraculous terracotta image of the Virgin, which according to local tradition restored speech to a deaf-mute young man in 1596. The votive offerings and devotional paintings that followed this reported miracle funded one of the most lavishly decorated interiors in the region. The dome fresco, depicting the Coronation of the Virgin, is particularly remarkable in its scale and quality.