Trani Cathedral

Trani Cathedral stands in a strikingly open position just a few metres from the Adriatic, a pale mass of stone with its tall bell tower rising beside the west front. It is built of the local Trani stone, a calcareous stone cut from caves in the town, so pale a pink that in strong light it looks almost white, and it is one of the principal monuments of the Apulian Romanesque. The church is dedicated to Saint Nicholas the Pilgrim, who died in Trani in 1094, and to the Assumption of the Virgin.

Work began in 1099 over an older church, Santa Maria della Scala, whose origins went back to the 4th century, and the new building was meant above all to receive the relics of Nicholas the Pilgrim. It was consecrated in 1143, long before it was finished. The decisive building campaign probably came between about 1159 and 1186 under Bishop Bertrando II, and by around 1200 the church was complete except for the bell tower: mostly raised between 1230 and 1239, its upper storeys were finished only in the 14th century, and like many Romanesque towers it opens up as it rises, with windows growing wider from floor to floor. Its 59 m stand on a tall pointed arch through which one can pass beneath the tower, an unusual feature for a Romanesque building. A double staircase leads up to the main portal, set in a blind arcade with ornament that shows the influence of Islamic art; its bronze doors were cast by Barisano da Trani in 1175, and the original panels are kept inside. The transept facing the sea ends in three apses decorated with blind arcading.

Because the church was built over the older one, its floor lies some 5 m above the ground outside. The upper church has a nave and two aisles divided by paired columns that carry women's galleries, under bare timber trusses. Fragments of a 12th-century floor mosaic, inspired by the one at Otranto, survive near the altar, including Alexander the Great carried skyward by griffins and Adam and Eve. Beneath lie two crypts, one dedicated to Nicholas and holding his relics, the other to Mary, and lower still, below sea level, the frescoed hypogeum of Saint Leucius. Trani, a port about 40 km by rail from Bari, was in the 11th century one of the most important harbours on the Adriatic: in 1063 it issued the Ordinamenta et consuetudo maris, considered the oldest surviving maritime code of the Latin West, and in the early 13th century the emperor Frederick II built a massive castle in the town.

Getting there

The cathedral stands on the seafront of Trani, about 1 km from the town centre. Trani station lies on the railway along the Adriatic coast, about 40 km west-northwest of Bari. The nearest airport is Bari Karol Wojtyła Airport (BRI), about 33 km to the southeast in a straight line.