Salerno Cathedral

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Beneath this cathedral rests an evangelist: the relics of Saint Matthew, apostle and author of the first Gospel, whose feast the Church keeps today, were solemnly brought to Salerno in 954 and laid in the crypt of the great church that the Norman conqueror Robert Guiscard raised over them from 1080. Pope Gregory VII, the fearless reformer exiled from Rome for defying an emperor, consecrated the cathedral himself in 1084 and died in Salerno the following year; his tomb rests here beside the apostle he honored. Enter through the atrium, unique in Italy alongside Milan's Sant'Ambrogio, where twenty-eight ancient Roman columns carry Arab-Norman arches beneath a twelfth-century bell tower, pass the bronze door cast in Constantinople, and descend to the Baroque crypt glowing with frescoes, where a two-faced statue of Saint Matthew looks out over a double altar so that pilgrims on every side stand before the one who wrote, Come to me, all you who labor.