In this cathedral of a small town in Basilicata a king of Naples was crowned. It happened in 1383: Louis of Anjou was claiming the throne, but the capital was in his rival's hands, and the crown was set on his head here, at Tricarico, in a hill town. He never entered Naples, and died shortly after without seeing his city.
What to see
The church was built in the eleventh century at the wish of Robert Guiscard, with donations from a nephew of his; a bishop's seat at Tricarico, however, is documented from 968, so a cathedral was probably here before that. The plan was Romanesque and can still be read, but what you see today is a late eighteenth-century interior.
There were three transformations, all willed by bishops: two in the seventeenth century, the second after the plague that emptied the town, and one in the eighteenth, entrusted to Neapolitan workmen with a royal engineer and an architect. It is they who gave the cathedral its present look, with its decorative apparatus and the chapels opened along the sides.
Visiting
The cathedral is in the centre of Tricarico, on the main square, an hour by car from Matera and from Potenza; free entry, with hours tied to services, so it is better to come in the morning or the late afternoon. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
Stand a minute in the middle of the nave and think of that ceremony: a French prince crowned king of Naples in a town of the Lucanian interior, before whoever had managed to get up here. Crowns were placed where they could be, and the history of great kingdoms passes through places like this more often than one thinks.