There is a door on the eastern flank of the church that opens once a year for indulgences and stays shut precisely in jubilee years, when every other Holy Door in Italy swings wide. It is a pointed gothic portal, raised above the street and reached by a flight of steps: the most visible reminder of the time when this parish church was a cathedral.
It was one, and for a long stretch. Santa Maria Assunta was raised to the seat of the diocese of Guardialfiera in 1061, on the highest point of the town, where tradition places an earlier pagan temple. The earthquake of 1456 levelled it; the rebuilding gave it the Holy Door. The cathedral title went in 1818, when Pius VII suppressed the diocese with the bull De utiliori and merged it into Termoli.
What to see
The main stone façade faces northwest: a central portal with a mixtilinear crown, an image of the Virgin, a lunette window and a triangular pediment to close it off. The square-based bell tower is younger than it looks: the earlier one was pulled down in 1845 as unsafe, and the replacement was designed by the engineer Vittorio Romanelli: the belfry has a single round-arched window on each side and closes with a pyramidal spire. Inside, the nave is single and broad, and has been so since 1858, when a remodelling erased the three-aisle plan. The side chapels remain under round arches, along with pilasters carrying Ionic capitals and the moulded entablature that supports the vaults. Beneath the floor lies the medieval crypt, found in 1975, where the old masonry has been left exposed.
Visiting
This is a working parish church: opening follows the mass schedule, and for the crypt it is best to ask at the presbytery. Tradition holds that the relics of a Saint Gaudentius are kept here. Recent restoration stripped patches of plaster from the outer walls, bringing older decorative pieces reused in the masonry back into view. Worth a slow lap around the building before you go in, reading the walls the way you read a palimpsest.