Basilica del Santo Sepolcro

A few steps from Barletta's bronze Colossus, the Basilica del Santo Sepolcro preserves the city's memory as a gateway to the Levant. The Romanesque church developed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries and holds a treasury of relics and works associated with the crusading era.

Why it matters

The basilica stood where the Adriatic branch of the Via Francigena met the road to Canosa, along routes used by pilgrims travelling toward the Holy Land. Papal documents from 1130 onward connected the church with the canons of the Holy Sepulchre. After the fall of Acre in 1291, the patriarch of Jerusalem was recorded as fleeing to Barletta with relics associated with the Holy Sepulchre, which became central to the church's treasury.

What to notice

The broad Romanesque façade is divided into bands, with a deeply recessed central portal. The treasure chapel above the narthex holds a stauroteca of gilded silver and Limoges enamel, said to contain a fragment of the True Cross. The treasury also includes a twelfth-century breviary of Jerusalem origin whose margins record crusading history from 1097 to 1202, a Gothic silver-and-crystal ostensorium and a Limoges eucharistic dove. On the right side of the church, the chapel of the Confraternity of San Carlo Borromeo, founded in 1618, contains a painting of the saint.

Context and history

The first secure document naming the church dates to 1130. Papal letters of 1138 and 1144 locate it and associate its foundation with the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre returning from Palestine. A pilgrims' hospice stood beside the church from the late eleventh or early twelfth century. King Robert of Anjou ordered the portico restored in 1312; an earthquake damaged the bell tower in 1456, and the medieval portico was demolished in 1770. The church became a collegiate church in 1852, a parish in 1908 and a minor basilica in 1951. Restoration in 1968–72 revealed remains of its medieval fabric.