In 1144 the bishop of Marsico Nuovo, Giovanni II, gave the monks of the Ordo Cavensis the Tramutola chapel of San Pietro, where the Greek rite was still celebrated. The Benedictines of Cava did not stop there: between 1153 and 1154 they built a monastery a short distance away, in 1163 they added a new church beside it, and in 1166 they had bishop Giovanni III consecrate it. That is the parish church of the Santissima Trinità, and its dedication says on its own who owned it: until 1972 Tramutola answered to the territorial abbey of the Santissima Trinità at Cava de' Tirreni, not to the neighbouring diocese.
What to see
The gabled façade, facing south-west, reads as three blocks. The central one is split into two registers by a string course and closed at the top by a triangular pediment: below sits the main doorway with its lunette, above it a semicircular window. The two lower side wings each have their own entrance. Alongside stands the bell tower on a square base, its belfry opened by round-arched single lights.
Inside, the three naves are divided by piers with pilaster strips and Corinthian capitals carrying round arches; above them runs a projecting moulded entablature, and higher still the attic register with its windows, probably built in 1731, when the damage left by an earthquake two years earlier was repaired. The ceiling is flat, with no vaulting. At the far end the presbytery, raised by a few steps, holds the high altar and closes in the apse under a pavilion vault.
Visiting
The plan you walk through today is not the one the Cava monks left: by the end of the sixteenth century the congregation had grown too large, and in 1628 the church was widened to three naves, while the side chapels belong to the same century. One of them, the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, was rededicated to the Sacred Heart in 1919, and in 1953 the whole building went through a restoration; the altar facing the congregation and the ambo arrived in the second half of the seventies, with the post-conciliar reordering. This is the parish church of the town, in the Val d'Agri pastoral area, so you will most often find it open around service times. Come in through the central doorway and look up first, towards the attic register: that is where you can measure how much the nave was raised.
Our editors' tip
Ask at the parish about the inscription of 1496. It recorded the rebuilding work commissioned by the archpriest Antonio De Luca together with the vicar Andrea Cestaro, and it stayed legible for centuries: A.D. M.IV.D ANT. DE LUCA ARCHIPRESB. I.D. - ANDREAS CESTARUS V. Knowing that those two names were already here more than a century before the naves became three changes the way you look at the piers.