In 1860, 2096 voters crowded into the rooms of the bishop's palace in Melfi to proclaim the town's accession to the Kingdom of Italy; a few weeks later, on 15 April, Carmine Crocco's brigand bands entered the town and the vote came to nothing. The building that had housed them was already old: the Normans raised it in the eleventh century beside the cathedral, and it has never stopped changing shape since.
What to see
The first large enlargement is fifteenth-century and is owed to bishop Gaspare Loffredo, at work between 1472 and 1480; after him Matteo Bramano took a hand. The earthquake of 1694 left the palace almost in rubble, and the eighteenth-century rebuilding ordered by bishops Antonio Spinelli and Pasquale Teodoro Basta changed its face almost completely: the Baroque skin, the balcony over the main doorway and the fountain with a circular basin all date from then. In 1846 the chronicler Cesare Malpica, travelling through Basilicata, ranked it among the finest palaces of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Inside come the double-flight staircase, the hall of coats of arms devised by Basta, the throne room with frescoed walls and a walled garden wanted by bishop Mario Rufino. Sculptures and paintings, sacred and secular alike, are attributed among others to Francesco da Tolentino, Andrea Miglionico, Andrea D'Aste, Cristiano Danona of Antwerp and Nicola Federici of Forenza. The bishop's library is here too, and keeps its sixteenth-century printed books.
Visiting
Today most people come in for the Diocesan Museum, which occupies part of the palace. Bishop Armando Franco founded it in October 1978, but the decree stayed dormant, the 1980 earthquake arrived and the restoration dragged on: the opening came only on 6 July 2011, with cardinal Angelo Bagnasco present. The entrance is next to the cathedral; before you climb the staircase, stop a moment in the courtyard, in front of the late eighteenth-century fountain.
Our editors' tip
Do not look here for the Rapolla sarcophagus: the palace kept it until the end of the seventies, then it moved to the Museo Nazionale del Melfese, inside the castle. Put the two visits in the same morning, both stay within the old town.