Cattedrale dei Santi Erasmo e Marciano (Duomo di Gaeta)

Consecrated in 1106 on the site of an older church, Gaeta's duomo binds the city to its two patron saints and to nearly a thousand years of building. A 57-metre Romanesque bell tower, surviving Roman columns, cosmatesque marble and a baroque crypt all share one dim, quiet interior.

Why it matters

The Cathedral of Saints Erasmus and Marcian is the religious centre of Gaeta and the anchor of its medieval quarter, in the old ducal town. It was consecrated by Pope Paschal II in 1106, on the site of an earlier church of Santa Maria del Parco that may go back to the seventh century, and its dedication to the two patrons was recorded as early as 995. Few Italian cathedrals compress so many eras into one nave: a twelfth-century bell tower, medieval marble fittings, a seventeenth-century crypt, a neoclassical reduction, a 1903 facade and a deep restoration finished in 2014. The campanile rises above the rooftops of the borgo.

What to notice

The bell tower was built between 1148 and 1279 to a quadrangular plan about 57 metres high. Its base opens through Gothic arches, three storeys rise above, and the octagonal top is ringed by four small cylindrical turrets covered in tiled domes and glazed majolica dishes — an Arab-Norman flourish that has no real parallel on this coast. The monumental staircase that flanks it doubles as the entrance to the duomo, past two Roman sarcophagi and trapezoidal bas-reliefs carved with the stories of Jonah, probably recycled from medieval pulpit screens. Inside, the paschal candlestand is the masterpiece: a cosmatesque "storied column" about 3.5 metres tall, carrying 48 carved panels that alternate scenes from the life of Christ with the passion of Saint Erasmus, and once paired with a pulpit from which the Exultet scroll was sung. Ancient columns re-emerged from the pillars during restoration, traces of the original seven-naved church. The main altar rests on a Roman strigillated sarcophagus that held the relics of the two saints until their canonical recognition in 2008. The crypt below, reached by a scissor marble staircase, keeps bronze gates, polychrome marble work by Dionisio Lazzari and frescoes by Giacinto Brandi finished in 1666.

Context and history

The dedication is unusual and very local. Erasmus, bishop of Antioch martyred under Diocletian, became the patron of sailors, and his cult reached Gaeta when his body was translated from nearby Formia in the eighth century; Marcian, bishop of Syracuse, joined him after Gaetan sailors acquired his relics at Patras. The medieval basilica they received was vast: seven aisles separated by six rows of Roman columns, later modulated towards Gothic forms in the thirteenth century. Baroque and neoclassical campaigns then trimmed the church down — from 1788 to 1793, with Bourbon financial help, the columns were encased in heavy pillars and the naves reduced to three, one of which still preserves fifteenth-century frescoes. Gaeta's nineteenth-century drama passed straight through the building: Pope Gelasius II was crowned here while taking refuge from the emperor in 1118–1119, and in 1848 Pius IX, besieged in the town, elevated the see to an archdiocese and declared the church a minor basilica by two documents of December 1848. Bombing on 9 September 1943 damaged the complex, and repairs ran into the 1950s; the most recent campaign, from 2008 to 2014 under Archbishop D'Onorio, peeled the church back towards its medieval layers and it was solemnly reopened on 27 September 2014.