Otranto Cathedral

The whole floor of Otranto Cathedral is a picture book in stone. A single mosaic of the 12th century spreads across the nave, the aisles, the presbytery and the apse, and it is one of the finest medieval pavements to have come down to us. Along a vast Tree of Life it gathers scenes from the Old Testament, figures from chivalric romance, beasts from medieval bestiaries, the building of the Tower of Babel, and Alexander the Great rising into the sky on a seat drawn by two griffins, an episode from the Alexander Romance that was popular across medieval Europe and the Byzantine world. The mosaic was commissioned by Jonatas, the first Latin archbishop of Otranto, and laid between 1163 and 1165 by a workshop led by Pantaleon, a monk from the Basilian monastery of San Nicola di Casole a few kilometres south of the town.

The cathedral itself was founded in 1068 by the Norman bishop William on ground that had held a Messapian village, a Roman house and an early Christian place of worship, and it was consecrated in 1088 under Pope Urban II. It mixes Byzantine, early Christian and Romanesque elements: a basilica 54 m long and 25 m wide with three aisles ending in apses, its arcades carried by granite columns, each with a different capital. Beneath the apse lies an 11th-century crypt, a small forest of more than seventy columns and pillars gathered from older buildings, with remains of frescoes from the Middle Ages to the 16th century. The coffered ceiling of black, white and gold over the nave dates from 1698.

The building also carries the memory of the darkest episode in the town's history. In August 1480 an Ottoman force took Otranto; townspeople and clergy who had sheltered in the cathedral were killed, the church was turned into a mosque, and its frescoes were destroyed. After the town was recovered in 1481 the church was rebuilt, and the large Gothic rose window was set into the west front. The Chapel of the Martyrs at the end of the right aisle holds, in seven glass-fronted cases, the bones of the citizens executed after refusing to give up their faith; by tradition they numbered about eight hundred. Otranto, a small port on the Adriatic in the far southeast of Apulia, grew from the ancient Hydruntum and lent its name to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, often called the first Gothic novel.

Getting there

The cathedral stands in the old town of Otranto, in the province of Lecce. The nearest larger town is Galatina, about 28 km away in a straight line, and the city of Lecce lies about 35 km to the northwest. The nearest airport is Brindisi (BDS), about 73 km to the northwest.