The bell tower of San Lorenzo stops halfway up: what stands beside the church is only the base of the tower that the family of Niccolò Acciaiuoli had rebuilt in the fourteenth century, which later collapsed and was never raised again. The rest is the building that people in Melfi call the oldest still standing in town: local sources date it to 1120, when it belonged to the abbey of Sant'Ippolito at Monticchio Laghi, while others push it further back, to the eleventh century and the Byzantines who had fortified Melfi in 1018.
What to see
The plan is octagonal: before it was a church, San Lorenzo was a baptistery, and the eight-sided shape still reads through everything later piled on top of it. The canons attached to the abbey of Monticchio settled here early and stayed for a long time; in 1500 the building became a parish church. The earthquakes that have repeatedly remade the face of Melfi did not spare it, and the Baroque dress you see today is the result of those rebuildings.
The portal and the long flight of steps leading up to the entrance are attributed to the seventeenth century. Until a few years ago a parish house stood against the left side of the portal: the works of 2015 pulled it down, and the flank of the church is fully visible again.
Visiting
San Lorenzo is one of the four corners of the medieval borgo, the trapezium stretched between the church, the castle, the cathedral and Porta Venosina; keep those points in mind and the old town, which grew radially around what is now piazza Umberto I, needs no map. The entrance sits at the top of the steps, so the façade is always seen from below; the first thing to look for, though, is the stump of the bell tower on the side, which shows how much the building has lost.
Our editors' tip
Walk around it before going in: the octagon reads far better from outside, where you can count the sides one by one, than from the reworked interior. Then stand on the side cleared in 2015 and look at the point where the old masonry meets the clean cut of the tower.