Basilica Cattedrale di San Cataldo

Taranto's cathedral is the oldest in Puglia, a layering of Byzantine-era church, medieval mosaic and Baroque theatre on the little square of the old island. Dedicated to San Cataldo, the city's patron bishop, it carries a thousand years of worship beneath a gilded coffered ceiling that still surprises travellers who expect a simple Romanesque hall.

Why it matters

The Duomo anchors the Città Vecchia. Its earliest fabric may reach the fifth century; the tenth-century rebuilding under the Byzantine emperor Niceforo II Foca gave the church the capocroce and crypt that survive at its eastern end, and around 1071 the three-aisled hall was added, its columns spoliated from ancient buildings. During those works the sarcophagus of San Cataldo came to light; his relics, found near the baptistery in 1071, rest today inside the high altar.

For the city it is both cathedral and civic landmark. The church was designated a minor basilica in 1974; its square occupies the ceremonial heart of the island on which ancient Taras stood.

What to notice

Ancient columns and capitals, mosaic floor fragments and a gilded wooden ceiling with statues of the Assunta and San Cataldo define the nave. The main altar bears a red porphyry ciborium with the four evangelists, commissioned in 1652 by Archbishop Caracciolo; an eighteenth-century wooden choir stands behind it.

On the right opens the Cappellone di San Cataldo, an elliptical Baroque chapel lined with marble inlay, glass paste, mother-of-pearl and lapis lazuli. Its sculptural cycle includes six statues by Giuseppe Sammartino, the Neapolitan master of the Veiled Christ, while the vault frescoes telling the saint's miracles are by Paolo De Matteis. A silver statue of the patron waits in a niche behind silver doors. In the left-hand Chapel of the Santissimo Sacramento hang seventeenth-century canvases by Molinari with more Sammartino marbles, and by the entrance vestibule the old baptistery holds the sculptor's San Giuseppe con il Bambino and San Giovanni Gualberto beside a Florentine Renaissance relief of the Madonna.

The medieval floor mosaic dates to the mid-twelfth century. The municipality dates it to 1163–1165 and attributes it to a mosaicist recorded as Petroius. Its medallion of Alexander the Great's flight links Taranto to a decorative tradition shared with other Apulian churches. Discovered in 1844, it is one of the few medieval pavements of this scale still in liturgical use.

Context and history

The church's dedication changed with its fortunes: first to Mary Magdalene, then to the Irish-born bishop Cataldo, whose cult the Normans consolidated after 1071. Excavations under the floor have uncovered a Lombard-age necropolis of the seventh and eighth centuries, evidence that the sacred area long precedes the standing walls. The tenor of the building shifted again in 1713, when the architect Mauro Manieri gave the west front its Baroque mask, and in the twentieth century the medieval bell tower was taken down in 1950–52.

Fire, earthquake and restyling have each left traces, which is why the interior reads as stratigraphy rather than a single stylistic statement: Byzantine east end, Norman-age nave, Baroque chapels, a crypt with frescoes of different hands and centuries below the main altar, and an inner hypogeal space holding a thirteenth-century sarcophagus, probably of a young girl.