The church of Sant'Erasmo, in the Castellone district of Formia, was the cathedral of the diocese of Formia until, in the ninth century, the bishop's seat moved to Gaeta. Around the burial of St Erasmus, the town's first bishop, martyred between the third and fourth centuries, a place of worship arose in the sixth century, mentioned in a letter of Pope Gregory the Great of 590. In the Carolingian age a large church was built with a semi-annular crypt. In the second half of the ninth century, because of the Saracen raids, the bishop and the saint's relics moved to Gaeta. A Benedictine monastery was attached to the church, recorded from 919 and later acquired by Montecassino; in 1491 it passed to the Olivetans, who stayed until 1806. The Turkish sack of 1532 destroyed much of the complex, restored in Renaissance forms between 1538 and 1560; after the bombardments of November 1860 the church was restored once more.
What to see
A flight of steps goes down to the broad forecourt, which lies lower than the street. The stepped façade is preceded by a portico of three round arches: in the piers you can see the ancient marble columns, incorporated by the Renaissance restorations. On the right is the sixteenth-century chapel of San Probo. The interior has a nave and two aisles of five bays, with cross vaults, divided by quadrangular Gothic piers of stone blocks. In the apse, rectangular in plan and frescoed, is the Baroque high altar in polychrome marbles; at the end of the right aisle an eighteenth-century processional statue represents St Erasmus.
Beneath the floor is an archaeological area, excavated between 1970 and 1976: a Roman necropolis, the fourth-century tomb of the martyr, the first cathedral of the fifth century, the Carolingian crypt and, in adjoining rooms, the Benedictine workshops of the eleventh century, the Olivetan structures of the sixteenth and chamber burials of the eighteenth.
Visiting
The church is a parish seat. Mass times and the possibility of visiting the archaeological area should be checked with the parish.
Our editors' tip
The organ has come a long way. It was built in 1912 by the English organ-builder Thomas Pendlebury for the Methodist church of Richmond, in North Yorkshire; the church in Formia bought it in 1988, and the organ-builder Maurizio Panaccione altered it, changing the action from pneumatic to electromagnetic.
