On the south flank of the co-cathedral there is a door that no longer opens. It is the pointed-arch portal commissioned in 1239 by bishop Giovanni — the inscription still says so — walled up together with its rose window during one of the many rebuildings. It probably ended up that way after the earthquake of 1456, the one that flattened the whole of Bojano: good stone, someone decided, better reused than lost.
Bojano was already a bishop's seat in 501, but the church itself is first mentioned in 1073, when the Norman count Rodolfo di Moulins had it restored. What follows is a list of collapses and fresh starts. The Sant'Anna earthquake of 1805, which struck from the nearby Matese massif, brought down the vault and the top of the bell tower; the bombing of the last war destroyed the frescoes Romeo Musa had only just painted. The outer walls, the tower and the facade survived. Hastily rebuilt, the church was reconsecrated in 1948.
What to see
Inside are three naves, 57 metres long and 17 wide, under a lunetted barrel vault. In the left aisle a column with a medieval capital juts out of the wall, and a glass case holds ceramics, liturgical objects and an episcopal ring found beneath the floor. The baptismal font is thirteenth-century, carved with an ox whose face is almost human and with a human head. Beside the high altar, canvases by Massimo Raffaele Giosia show Saint Bartholomew preaching in the Indies; above them, the fresco cycle by Rodolfo Papa is brand new, unveiled by cardinal Angelo Bagnasco in 2011.
The most recent find lies under the high altar: the eleventh-century crypt, brought back to light during work in 1996 and visible from above through a semicircular glass floor. You go down seven steps, one for each of the deadly sins, past paintings that follow a baptismal thread — the Flood, the crossing of the Red Sea, the meeting at Jacob's well, the Baptism in the Jordan — and stones carved by the artist Fiorata Spina with words from the letter of Peter. A spring of living water runs beneath the crypt; no other church is said to be in the same position.
Our editors' tip
Before going in, walk round to the Giardino dei Pentri on the north side. There are thirteen medieval tomoli, capacity measures hollowed out of stone for counting grain and pulses, a Lombard capital under the Madonna's shrine, and a Roman inscription set into the wall beside the doorway, a reminder that Bovianum was a Roman municipium. The base of the bell tower rests on huge squared blocks that some attribute to an earlier Samnite building: the oldest history of Bojano, in short, is more outside the church than inside it.