Duomo di Benevento (Cattedrale Santa Maria de Episcopio)

Benevento Cathedral tells two stories at once: an early Christian seat of bishops reaching back to the fourth century, and a radical twentieth-century reconstruction after the bombing of 1943. Its medieval bell tower and facade survived; its celebrated bronze door, cast between 1156 and 1170, returned to the front as a faithful 2012 replica.

Why it matters

Dedicated to Santa Maria de Episcopio, the metropolitan cathedral is the principal church of Benevento and the visible summit of an ecclesiastical history documented from the earliest Christian era: the city had its own bishop in the person of Januarius, martyred at Pozzuoli in 305, and Pope Leo the Great's letter of 448 to Bishop Doro confirms a well-established church by the fifth century, when the first cathedral rose over disused Roman public buildings. The early Christian basilica used fifty-four reused Doric columns from a single Roman monument. Destroyed almost entirely by the air raids of 1943 along with the bishop's quarter around it, the cathedral was rebuilt between 1948 and 1950 to a design by the architect Paolo Rossi De Paoli, keeping the medieval facade, the great bell tower and two-thirds of the pseudo-crypt as anchors of memory.

What to notice

The facade, redesigned from the late twelfth century under Archbishop Ruggero Sanseverino and completed in the thirteenth, has two orders of arcades. Its rose window has twelve radial columns and once held a mosaic of the Mystic Lamb; statues, including a knight, crown the front. The Romanesque bell tower was raised between 1277 and 1280. The bronze door, the original Janua Maior, was cast in lost wax between the mid-twelfth century and 1170. Measuring 323 by 460 centimetres, it carries seventy-two panels with New Testament scenes, including a pope enthroned consecrating a bishop—possibly Adrian IV—and Archbishop Errico with twenty-three suffragans. Damaged in the war and restored over more than a decade, the original has been represented on the facade since 2012 by a replica made with the medieval lost-wax technique. An underground archaeological area was laid out beneath the floor in the early 2000s and links the early chapels behind the transept with the city's history.

Context and history

Across the Middle Ages the cathedral grew with the city: after the fire of 1119 recorded by the notary Falcone's chronicle, the hall was restored and the bronze door installed; the monumental basilica of San Bartolomeo rose beside it between 1112 and 1153 and collapsed, unrebuilt, after the earthquake of 1702. The earthquake of 1456 brought papal aid from Pius II and a newly consecrated altar in 1473. Archbishop Giovan Battista Foppa raised and gilded the coffered ceiling in the mid-seventeenth century, and Archbishop Vincenzo Maria Orsini, the future Benedict XIII, repaired the structure after the quakes of 1688 and 1702. What the bombs of 1943 left — the thirteenth-century facade, the tower, the crypt core — was restored and knitted into De Paoli's rebuild of 1948–1950, giving the interior its grand, severe character today. The adjacent archbishop's palace houses the diocesan museum and its collections.