The biography of this church is a list of earthquakes. A shock damaged it at the end of the seventeenth century, another left cracks in the front a few years later, the one of 1857 brought it seriously to its knees and the Irpinia earthquake of 1980 forced it to close for worship. Each time it was repaired, and each time it took decades.
What to see
It was built in the mid sixteenth century on the remains of the feudal palace of the Brancaccio, and the palace cellars were adapted as underground burial vaults: the lord's cellars became the town's tombs. Work stopped almost at once for lack of funds and was taken up and finished a dozen years later.
In the eighteenth century the church was given its sacristy and rededicated to Santa Maria Assunta. After the mid nineteenth-century earthquake the repair began only twenty-two years later and involved demolishing and rebuilding the entire nave; then came the restoration of the side chapels and, in the twentieth century, new pews.
Visiting
The church is the parish church of San Mauro Forte, in the province of Matera, in the val Basento; it reopened for worship at the end of the nineteen-eighties after the post-earthquake works, and today it opens for services. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
The nave you are standing in is younger than what surrounds it: it was pulled down and remade after the nineteenth-century shock, while front and chapels are older. Look for the points where the new meets the old, at the joins of the side walls. In a southern church the joints are the chronology of the earthquakes.