Cattedrale di Santa Maria Annunziata

Nearly at the centre of Castro's old borgo stands the church locals also call the Chiesa dell'Annunziata: an Apulian Romanesque cathedral completed in 1171, damaged during Turkish raids and restored under a bishop after 1576. Its blind arcades, rose windows and Baroque high altar remain prominent features.

Why it matters

The Cathedral is Castro's principal historic church and one of the southern Salento's textbook examples of Romanesque building. An inscription on the north facade fixes 1171 as the year construction was completed. Raised to a bishop's seat in 682 under Pope Leo II according to the municipal portal, devastated in the Turkish incursions of the sixteenth century, it was restored and re-consecrated to the Madonna Annunziata on the third Sunday of October 1576 by Bishop Luca Antonio Resta. Since 1969 the former diocese has survived as a titular episcopal seat of the Catholic Church.

What to notice

Outside, read the facade in Apulian Romanesque grammar: walls rhythmically divided by blind arcades and pilaster strips, two portals — the small door and the great door — each crowned by a large rose window, and a bell tower now at the northwest corner though it originally stood on the east side. Restorations completed in 2010 returned the exterior to its presumed original lines after later accretions. Step inside and the space resolves into a Latin cross held within one broad nave: repeated rebuilds ended in 1670, when the wooden roof was replaced by the barrel vault carried on ten columns, five to a side. The baroque high altar, erected by bishops De Marco and Capreoli between 1670 and 1685, stands — so tradition holds — over the remains of the temple of Minerva, and keeps two seventeenth-century paintings of the Madonna Annunziata, patron protectress of the city. Seek out the side-altar canvases by painters of the Kingdom of Naples, the chapel holding relics of Santa Dorotea, co-patron of Castro, the papier-mâché statues used in procession, and the Byzantine-style fresco of Santa Lucia.

Context and history

The church's story runs with Castro's own: a Christian centre on a headland already sacred in antiquity, sacked during the Ottoman century that culminated in the fall of Otranto, and refounded ceremonially in 1576. The cathedral of the old diocese of Castro, it lost its diocesan status when the see was suppressed, its title continuing today in the person of a titular bishop. Along its north flank lie the remains of an eighth-to-ninth-century Byzantine church about two metres below street level. To the south stands the restored Vescovado, the old bishop's palace.