Carved into the triumphal arch is a date, 1523, made legible again only by restoration work: it is not the year the church went up, because Sant'Antonio was built in 1423, but the year it was rebuilt after the earthquake of the fifteenth century. From then on the building kept taking hits. In 1528, during the siege of Melfi that local memory calls the Blood Easter, the army of Odet de Foix damaged it badly; it stood up to the earthquakes of 1731 and 1752; the one in 1851, which brought half the town to its knees, hit it hard, and the restoration that followed the disaster gave the church the face it has today.
What to see
Romanesque and Gothic sit side by side inside, with frescoes of the period still on the walls. Two things are worth hunting for: a wooden statue of Saint Anthony holding the Child, painted in gold, and a canvas by Carlo Sellitto showing the Souls in Purgatory.
The restoration also brought two Gothic arches back into view from under later alterations, and it is the triumphal one that carries the date of 1523. Even the church's name turns out to be a late decision: the dedication to Saint Anthony took hold between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the building was already more than two hundred years old.
Visiting
Take things in chronological order rather than by size: the Gothic arches and the carved date first, then the frescoes, and last the wooden statue and the Sellitto canvas. Anyone arriving here after the castle and the cathedral will recognise the sequence that runs through the whole of Melfi, made of earthquakes, sieges and reopened building sites; here, though, you read it in a few dozen square metres, with nothing in between.
Our editors' tip
Line the two numbers up, 1423 on paper and 1523 on stone: exactly one hundred years separate the building from the rebuilding. It is the most honest measure of how often, under Mount Vulture, people had to start again from scratch.
