Duomo di Gioia Tauro

Gioia Tauro's cathedral is a 20th-century rebuild with older roots: a previous mother church, recorded for centuries, was destroyed in the earthquakes that shattered this coast, and the present church rose in its place. Officially the Chiesa di Sant'Ippolito Martire, it honours the city's patron and anchors the historic centre beside its 18th-century fountain.

Why it matters

The cathedral is a record of catastrophe and persistence. The parish of Sant'Ippolito predates the present building, which was erected around 1930. As the mother church of Gioia Tauro, it is associated with the city's patronal feast of Sant'Ippolito.

What to notice

The facade is sober and symmetrical, with three entrance portals and a central rose window showing the face of Christ ringed by the four symbols of the evangelists. The interior unfolds as a three-aisled basilica: columns and arches carry the division between nave and aisles, side chapels line the flanks, three apses bring the hall to its close, and overhead the roof is left to open trusses. In the central nave, the niche of the patron's statue is flanked by two 18th-century columns said to come from the earlier church, and a 19th-century painting depicts the martyrdom of Sant'Ippolito.

Twelve stained-glass windows, conceived in the early 1980s by archpriest Monsignor Francesco Laruffa and executed by Giuseppe Niglia, give the interior its characteristic coloured light. The organ, installed in 1937 with about 700 pipes, was later restored and enlarged to roughly 1,500 pipes.

Context and history

The parish church of Gioia Tauro stood for generations in the area of the old settlement near Piano delle Fosse; an archival record documents it from at least the mid-nineteenth century. The earthquakes that struck Calabria between 1894 and 1908 ruined the old mother church — the archive record assigns its definitive destruction to the 1908 earthquake — and the present building was constructed in the years around 1930, Allied bombing damaged the church in 1943; it was restored after the war and rearranged in later twentieth-century campaigns.