Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta e San Giovanni Battista

Aosta's cathedral stands where the city has always kept its sacred heart: beside the cryptoporticus that once framed the Roman forum. Inside, layered from a late antique baptistery through Romanesque towers and medieval floor mosaics to a baroque high altar, it tells fifteen centuries of Alpine Christianity in a single building.

Why it matters

The first cathedral of Aosta was built here at the end of the fourth century, a large single-naved hall with a western baptistery, on ground that formed part of the forum's sacred area. The church that stands today is essentially the eleventh-century Romanesque rebuilding, and with the collegiate church of Sant'Orso it made Aosta one of the principal centres of Ottonian art in Europe — a claim the regional tourism portal makes explicitly, thanks above all to the fresco cycles preserved under both roofs. The cathedral remains the seat of the diocese and the city's parish church.

What to notice

The octagonal basin of the paleochristian baptistery lies at the beginning of the central nave, and the choir floors carry twelfth- and fourteenth-century mosaics with the months of the year, real and fantastic animals, and the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Coloured windows sit behind the choir; the space beneath the roof preserves eleventh-century frescoes. Around the choir runs a thirteenth-century deambulatory, and the crypt below is an eleventh-century three-aisled space mixing medieval columns with reused Roman ones. The west front pairs a sixteenth-century atrium frescoed with scenes from the life of the Virgin and a neoclassical facade added in 1848, while the two apsidal bell towers preserve the Romanesque silhouette.

Context and history

The sequence of building campaigns is unusually legible. A Christian place of worship rose east of the cryptoporticus before the first recorded cathedral was constructed toward the end of the fourth century. The great Romanesque rebuilding of the eleventh century gave the church its present form, with the western section remodelled to carry two towers and a projecting central apse; in the thirteenth century two of the original five apses were demolished to make room for the deambulatory. Inside, the baroque high altar in black marble with multicoloured inlays, a fourteenth-century wooden crucifix and carved choir stalls from around 1460 mark later eras. The trapezoidal cloister, finished in 1460 on the site of an eleventh-century predecessor, lost part of its southern wing around 1860 to the neo-Gothic Rosary chapel. The cathedral treasury is displayed in a museum in the deambulatory, combining the cathedral's own treasures with works from parishes across the valley.