Overview
The Old Cathedral, the largest church in the region in Apulian Romanesque style, with its aligned domes, is set back from the city centre, just a stone's throw from the sea. It's no wonder that one of the two bell towers was used to sight ships arriving from the Adriatic. What is now the main façade on the harbour, designed so that the church would be clearly visible from the sea, until 1882, was right over the water, which is why it appears bare.
The church is dedicated to the city's patron saint, a nobleman from Bavaria who, after an adventurous youth as a crusader warrior, retired as a hermit to a cave in the Land of Bari. Begun around the middle of the 12th century and completed in the following century, the church was built according to the construction scheme of three different-sized domes, pyramidal in shape, with half-vaulted side aisles. The first building must have progressed in various stages, as shown by the two bell towers (the only part to have survived complete until now) and the trace of the blind side arches, reminiscent of the forms of the Basilica of St Nicholas in Bari. The three-nave interior is rather poor and, of the original sacred furnishings, it preserves the 12th-century Saracen stoup, a man with exotic features, a coeval stone pluteus in the chapel of St. Michael the Archangel and the 13th-century stone high relief supporting the high altar. On the roofs over the naves there is something of the Itria Valley: the tiles are of the same stone used for the trulli in Alberobello.
Via chiesa vecchia, 70056 Molfetta BA, Italia
