Amalfi Cathedral

At the head of the Piazza del Duomo in Amalfi, a facade of striped stone and marble, glittering mosaics and pointed arches fills the end of the piazza. Amalfi Cathedral, dedicated to the Apostle Andrew, is a layered building in which more than a thousand years of work show at once: Arab-Norman, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque elements over a medieval core, with the adjoining 9th-century Basilica of the Crucifix and the cloister alongside.

The first church on the site was built in the 9th century on the ruins of an earlier temple; it now houses the diocesan museum. A second church went up beside it to the south in the 10th century, and that is the present cathedral. By the 12th century the two had been joined into a single Romanesque church of six aisles, reduced to five in the 13th century to make room for the Cloister of Paradise, a courtyard in the Arab-Norman style. The relics of Saint Andrew are said to have been brought from Constantinople in 1206, in the wake of the Fourth Crusade, and rest in the crypt beneath the church. Local tradition holds that a liquid called "manna" gathers at his tomb and is collected on feast days. The bell tower, raised in the 12th and 13th centuries, ends in an elaborate crown decorated with marble and coloured majolica. The main doors are among the treasures of the church: cast in bronze in Constantinople before 1066 and signed by Simeon of Syria, they are the earliest post-Roman bronze doors made for an Italian church. The facade that greets the piazza today, however, is a 19th-century work: after part of the old front collapsed in 1861, the architect Errico Alvino designed a new one in an Arab-Norman and Gothic manner, completed in 1891, with a mosaic of the Triumph of Christ in the gable based on designs by Domenico Morelli.

Inside, the nave was given a Baroque dress in the 18th century, with a coffered ceiling of 1702 and paintings by Andrea dell'Asta; the high altar incorporates the sarcophagus of Peter of Capua, who died in 1214, and two Egyptian granite columns hold up the triumphal arch. Amalfi lies at the mouth of a deep ravine below cliffs on the Gulf of Salerno. Between 839 and about 1200 it was the capital of a maritime republic that traded across the Mediterranean and rivalled Pisa and Genoa, and today it gives its name to the Amalfi Coast, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Getting there

The cathedral stands on the Piazza del Duomo in the centre of Amalfi. The town is reached by the SS163 Amalfitana coastal road, and its port has boat connections with Salerno, Positano and Capri. Salerno lies about 14 km to the east in a straight line; Gragnano, on the far side of the mountains behind the coast, is about 9 km away. The nearest airport is Salerno Costa d'Amalfi Airport (QSR), about 26 km away in a straight line; Naples Airport (NAP) is about 37 km to the north.