Piazza Vescovado

Enclosed and rectangular, Piazza Vescovado has been the civic and religious heart of Casertavecchia since the village was a bishop's seat. The cathedral fills one side; the tufa Bishops' Palace and a seventeenth-century former seminary frame the rest, above lanes that look out over the Campanian plain.

Why it matters

Every medieval hill town funnelled its life into one paved room, and in Casertavecchia that room keeps its original name: Vescovado, the bishop's seat. The piazza gathered the institutions that made the village a city — the cathedral of San Michele Arcangelo on one side, the palace of the bishops opposite, the seminary nearby — and its very pavement narrates the borgo's rank between the Norman conquest and the move of the diocese downhill. The name is no archaism: the municipality records that the episcopal seat was established in the borgo in the early Middle Ages, and the square remained the diocese's home until 1842.

What to notice

The southern arch, identified in the municipal description as the square's gateway, contains four stone slabs commemorating visits by Pope Benedict XIII in the 1720s. The cathedral facade and its 1234 bell tower face the Palazzo dei Vescovi, a two-storey tufa building with two round-arched portals. Beside it, the former seminary is a seventeenth-century palazzo with marble columns at its entrance. An iron cross erected in 1953 marks the seventh centenary of the cathedral's consecration. The surrounding houses have finely worked tufa portals.

Context and history

The square's history is the borgo's history in miniature. When the diocese established itself at Casertavecchia in the early medieval period, the church of the see, the bishop's residence and their service buildings naturally clustered together, and the space between them became the village's forum — part parvis, part marketplace, part council ground. The Palazzo dei Vescovi took its surviving form in the era of the cathedral's maturity, and the seminary added in the seventeenth century shows the institution still investing here long after the Norman zenith. The end came with the Bourbons: once the royal palace drew a new city on the plain below, the municipality records that the bishopric itself was transferred in 1842, and the square's ecclesiastical functions drained away with it. Sacred, residential and institutional buildings still face one another across the piazza, preserving the square's historic civic form.