Until a few years ago you walked on the original floor: sixteenth-century terracotta, laid when the chapel of the Assunta had already been standing for some time. It is gone now, and in Viggianello it is the first thing people will tell you about this small building. The chapel was wanted by the Sanseverino princes in the 15th century, in the very years when the village passed firmly into their hands: the Sanseverino, princes of Bisignano, held Viggianello in fief from that century onwards, and the Assunta is the mark they left among the churches of the old town.
What to see
Inside there survives a sixteenth-century fresco, cautiously attributed to Ferro. It helps to look at it knowing what stands around it: almost every other church in Viggianello is older and goes back to the Byzantine or Norman period, from the chapels of the farming hamlets scattered across the countryside to the church of San Nicola beside the castle, now reduced to ruins with a few traces of fresco. The Assunta is another matter: a lordly foundation, wanted by a feudal family that in those same decades was rewriting the village from above.
The closest term of comparison is the castle. In the sixteenth century those same Sanseverino turned the fortress into a residence, the need for defence having passed: the chapel belongs to that season, when local power stopped fortifying itself and started building to be seen.
Visiting
This is a minor building and should be taken as such: a short stop inside a longer walk through the old town. Bear in mind that Viggianello is not a compact village but a cluster of inhabited nuclei of different sizes, a settlement pattern already recorded on maps of 1797, so expect climbs, narrow lanes and a few directions to ask for along the way. Once inside, the first thing to look for is the floor, and the point where the old terracotta gave way to the new.
Our editors' tip
Pair it with the mother church of Santa Caterina d'Alessandria, enlarged or rebuilt from scratch under the Bronzuto barony in 1634, and ask about the crypt: down there three mummified priests sit on a bench, covered in gilded vestments. Seen straight after the princes' chapel, it explains better than any label how devotion piled up in Viggianello: one chapel wanted by one family, a mother church rebuilt by another.