The Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca dates from 1723, a project by Carlo Francesco Dotti, one of the most important architects in the Papal States in the 18th century. Inside the basilica’s is the ‘treasure’, an image of a black Virgin Mary with Child, supposedly painted by St Luke. Tradition holds that in the 12th-century, a pilgrim from the Byzantine empire came to Bologna with an icon of the Virgin from the temple of Saint Sofia in Constantinople.