Acerenza is a small miracle of contamination: it is a piece of Ireland brought to the South, a fragment of France carved in the sandstone, a vague Nordic impression that catches the eye, when the blue eyes of some silent elder look at you without filters. If this city were a color, it would be like the ruby of the Aglianico del Vulture, and would have the rhythmic sound of the steps of the processions and of its historical parade. If Acerenza were a flavor, it would be as simple as the macaroni made with the fingers, and as old as the oil that slides slowly on durum wheat bread. If Acerenza were a woman, she would be beautiful and austere, she would be feminine without the need for tinsel, she would cling to herself like the monsters that climb to her Cathedral.
A fortress city evoked by the poet Horace in his odes. A bulwark that resisted the Byzantine assaults and was a flagship of the military defenses of the Langobards. A gigantic Romanesque cathedral in Northern Basilicata set within the walls of a medieval city. So we can summarize Acerenza.
"The eagle's nest of high Acerenza": this is how the Latin poet Horace described one of the most beautiful towns in the Upper Bradano area, proudly perched on a tuff base at over eight hundred meters above sea level. This strategic position has been, for centuries, the cross and delight of this town, disputed by Langobards and Byzantines, conquered by the Normans, owned by the Swabians, by the Angevins and finally by the Aragonese. His Diocese is one of the oldest in southern Italy: archbishop Arnaldo, former abbot of Cluny, France, stayed here and dreamed of a majestic cathedral for Acerenza, capable of ruling the valleys, and for this French architects and local workers completed the church, making it so breathtakingly beautiful, as mysterious as enchanting.
You can spend hours, going around the Cathedral of Acerenza, trying to look into the eyes of anthropomorphic figures, the strange animals that enter the stone and make it alive, or to discover the history of the patron San Canio, sentenced to death during the persecution of the emperor Diocletian. It is said that the executioner and the soldiers were frightened by a violent storm, accompanied by earthquakes, which were triggered when the saint was about to be beheaded, thus giving him the opportunity to escape and hide near the Volturno. Even today the pastoral care of San Canio, considered miraculous, is preserved in the Cathedral, and is revered by numerous devotees.
Putting aside the imaginative historical reconstructions always part of local narrative, the first historical traces were discovered in the second half of the nineteenth century by the famous French archaeologist François Lenormant, who brought some finds he found in the Louvre museum in Paris. His texts on Acerenza often speak of Oscans, but the whole area was populated by Daunians. In the second book of the history of Rome by Tito Livio, it is reported that Acerenza was occupied in republican times by the forces of the Roman consul Gaius Junius Bubulco Brutus around 317 BC. but like many towns in the Upper Bradano area, Acheruntia was a Daunian center occupied militarily by the Samnites and only with the defeat of the latter did it enter the orbit of the Roman Urbs permanently. An epigraph dated around the middle of the 1st century B.C. certifies the recognition of Acerenza as a Roman municipium. The Latin poet Quinto Orazio Flacco mentions it in the Odes (book III, 4, 9.20) as "placed on a mountain like an eagle's nest". The city dominated the great arteries that connected the South with Rome, the Via Appia, the Appia-Traiana and the Via Erculea that led to the Ionian coast. Other testimonies are votive epigraphs, bas-reliefs and columns of the pagan temple dedicated to "Acheruntian Hercules" dated from the second century B.C. until first A.D. that we find as recycle material in the decorative apparatus of the Cathedral Basilica and a votive bronze statuette from the fifth century BC depicting the hero with club and the Nemean lion fur. The greatest testimonies are, however, from the Late Antique period, such as the stone bust of the 4th century A.D. attributed the emperor Julian the Apostate and the dedicatory epigraph of the Acheruntian senate, in addition to the numerous late-antique rustic villas very common throughout Upper Bradano, owned by rich Roman aristocratic landlords.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the reign of Odoacre and the occupation by Totila, Acerenza became one of the strongholds of the Goths, later disputed between the Langobards and the Byzantines. The Roman and late ancient walls stayed inviolate until 788 AD when the emperor Charlemagne had them brought down together with those of Salerno and Conza. The Duke of Benevento Grimoaldo II, after carrying out the imposed orders, abandoned the ancient center of the Piani della Maddalena and rebuilt the city by fortifying the cliff where the Castle already stood. In the year 817 AD Sicone the gastald of Acerenza killed, in the castle of the village, Grimoaldo IV Duke of Benevento, taking his place and ruling until 832. With the reconquest launched by the Byzantines after the fall of the Arab Emirate of Bari (871) the city became part of the new Thema of Lucania although Acerenza retains officials of Langobard origin while it had Byzantine bishops appointed from Otranto. During the first half of the 11th century, the Normans would be the new protagonists of Southern Italy and with a series of victories against the Byzantines in 1041 (Olivento, Montemaggiore and Montepeloso) they would occupy the whole territory of Bradano up to Matera. Subsequently, the archbishop of Acerenza Arnaud of Saint Evroult (1066 -1101) will play the role of mediator between the excommunicated Robert of Hauteville and Pope Gregory VII, thanks to which Arnaut will receive from Guiscard and the Pope a substantial sum of money to finish the Cathedral, dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and San Canio.
The current Acheruntian Cathedral insists on a site already abundantly used as a sacred area, in fact it was built on a Roman temple dedicated to Acheruntian Hercules estimated around the 1st B. - 1st AD and on a Cathedral of late Roman Empire. In the winter of 2006, during the renovation of the square today named after Arnaldo, wall structures dating back to the VI-VII century A.D. were found, most likely environments referable to Cathedral of late Roman Empire. The beginning of the construction of the Cathedral dates back to the end of the 11th century under the Archbishop Arnaldo of Saint Evroul and ended in the first decades of the twelfth century. The building is Romanesque in style with French influences and a Latin cross plan. Its peculiarity is the Capocroce that distinguishes it and characterizes it compared to the other Romanesque cathedrals, in fact, in addition to the Acheruntian one in Italy there are only two others adopted the same planimetric scheme, Saint Paul of Aversa and the S.S. Trinity of Venosa. The sober and linear façade has been remodeled several times, already around the 13th century with the insertion of the Romanesque portal of Apulian influence guarded by a protruding prothyrum decorated with statues with strong warning tones.
The structure originally had two bell towers that both collapsed in the 1456 earthquake. Later only the south-west tower was rebuilt in 1555 thanks to Archbishop G. Michele Saraceno. The Cathedral is about 69 m long and 23 wide, with a 39-meter rib vault, three naves with 10 massive pillars, five on each side and has an area of about 2050 square meters. Inside, the vault is supported by a fake "wooden" entablature with trusses, with an octagonal dome. It has a choir with ambulatory on which three radial chapels open around the central apse and others du carved in the transepts. The ambulatory has a very particular coverage characterized by cross vaults generated by pointed arches. In one of the apses there is the simulacrum and the relic of the stisk of the patron San Canio. Inside the cathedral we find eighteenth-century statues, Renaissance works and frescoes from the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries. The jewel of the Cathedral is the Ferrillo Crypt completed in 1524, with wall frescoes and refined decorations and bas-reliefs in pure Renaissance style.