A slab set on the entrance portal gives the exact date of the consecration: 30 July 1319. That kind of precision is rare for a medieval church in Molise, and it works as a key to the building, because the site did not close then. The shifts of style you notice inside, from one bay to the next, come from changes in the direction of the works between the end of the 13th century and the first decades of the 14th, with different workshops taking over from one another.
The dedication is double, to Saint Mary of the Assumption and to Saint Pardus, patron of the town. The cult of Pardus is older than the building: in 1081 a deed of donation by one Luffrido, a priest of Larino, already mentions a church in his name, then outside the built-up area. In 1928 Pope Pius XI raised the cathedral to the rank of minor basilica; today it is co-cathedral of the diocese of Termoli-Larino.
What to see
Fourteenth-century frescoes with figures of saints survive on the walls and the piers and, to the left of the entrance, inside, an Annunciation added in 1537. The bell tower is of the 16th century, but its base is older: it was built in 1451 by master Giovanni di Casalbore, who came from Avellino. Many altars are of the 16th century too, commissioned by private citizens in a season of intense artistic activity; the relics of Saint Pardus had been placed in an altar of the right aisle in the century before.
Visiting
What you see today is the outcome of two opposite changes of mind. In the Baroque period the floor was raised, two windows were opened beside the portal, the trussed ceiling gave way to coffering, and the chancel was lifted and fitted with an altar and a bishop's throne in polychrome marble worked by Neapolitan craftsmen. Then, in the 19th century, Bishop Francesco Giampaolo went the other way: he rediscovered the Middle Ages, changed the windows to pointed arches, extended the side aisles towards the chancel, had the arcades and capitals decorated in a fourteenth-century manner and gave Ludovico Palladino the neo-Gothic paintings of the ceiling. In between, the 17th century had been a time of poverty: the plague of 1656 left the town on its knees, and the statue of Saint Pardus commissioned then by Bishop Catalani was later stolen. The tower you see is a rebuilding: lightning destroyed it in 1943.