Beside the old abbey the Normans began to build a new one, far larger, and never finished it: the high walls remain, the columns, the apses open to the sky. They call it the Incompiuta, the unfinished one, and there is nothing like it in Italy, because unfinished churches are usually pulled down or completed, and this one has stayed like this for eight centuries.
What to see
The walls were raised with the stones of the Roman amphitheatre next door: you can recognise the squared blocks, the cornices and the pieces of inscription reused as building material. There are also slabs with Hebrew letters, taken from the catacombs of the Jewish community of Venosa: in the same wall three ages and three peoples live together.
In the old church beside it are the tombs of the Hauteville brothers, the Normans who conquered southern Italy, among them that of Robert Guiscard. Below is an early Christian baptistery, and the complex is visited like a vertical stratigraphy: catacombs, old church, church never finished.
Visiting
The complex is just outside the centre of Venosa, in the province of Potenza, ten minutes on foot from the main square; paid ticket, often combined with the archaeological park and the museum. An hour and a half.
Our editors' tip
Go into the Incompiuta and look for the stones with writing on them: Latin, Hebrew, medieval, set at random in the wall because they served to hold it up. A medieval building site took whatever was there, and in those walls you read the history of Venosa without needing a museum.