Chiesa Matrice della Santissima Trinità

The Collegiata rises above Manduria with a Gothic campanile and a five-aisled hall shaped by the town's sixteenth-century rebuilding. After restoration, worship resumed in December 2024.

Why it matters

The Chiesa Matrice is the mother parish of the Diocese of Oria. Its history includes a Norman-era predecessor, a sixteenth-century rebuilding on five naves, an earthquake-damaged bell tower and a major restoration completed in 2024. Its facade brings together a sculpted Renaissance portal, a Romanesque rose window and a Gothic campanile.

What to notice

The portal carries the Most Holy Trinity carved by maestro Raimondo da Francavilla in 1532, with the motto Hi Tres Unum sunt — these three are one — and two stone lions from the Norman structure stand beside it as silent survivors of the older church. Above, the hard-stone rose window unfolds in a triple crown of angels, prophets and vine tendrils. The interior has five naves, divided by a colonnade with decorated capitals, leading to an apse with fourteen gilded statues in Lecce stone and a wooden pulpit of 1608 ranked among the finest works of Apulian craft. It also contains a baptistery chapel with a 1543 font, the chapels of San Gregorio Magno and the Santissimo Sacramento, and the chapel of the Madonna di Loreto beneath the presbytery in a hypogean space.

Context and history

A smaller Norman church once stood on the site, probably within the footprint of today's presbytery. The present layout took shape from the first half of the sixteenth century, funded by citizens' generosity and extended in later centuries. The parish was dedicated to the Santissima Trinità on 13 December 1584. The campanile — quadrangular, Gothic, five levels, likely begun in the fourteenth century — lost its top level in the earthquake of 1743 and was rebuilt in 1851 with pinnacles. San Gregorio Magno, patron of Manduria, is honoured here by an eighteenth-century wooden statue. Restoration work begun after the church's closure in June 2021 renewed the facade, rose window, lunette, sixteenth-century apsed choir and wooden coffered ceiling. Bishop Vincenzo Pisanello of Oria presided over the reopening Mass on 15 December 2024. A living tradition links the church to the sanctuary of San Pietro in Bevagna on the coast, whose pilgrimage in honour of the Apostle traditionally arrives here.