On the corbel to the left of the portal lunette stands a small figure of Saint Bassus, and just above it, over the pilasters, dragons and griffins jut out of the wall. That is how the front of Termoli's cathedral works: a stone repertory to be read close up, arch by arch, before you go in. It faces east, towards the sea, and reaches 22 metres at its highest point.
The church stands on the headland of the old town, where a larger church dedicated to the Virgin is recorded in 1037, itself raised over the remains of a pagan temple to Castor and Pollux. The building we see dates from the 12th and 13th centuries, Apulian Romanesque throughout; the upper part of the front, however, belongs to the rebuilding that followed the earthquake of 1464 and the Turkish raid of 1566, and it gives itself away at once through the different stone and the Gothic cut.
What to see
The lower order of the facade has seven arches: the central one, wider and taller, holds the portal, while some of the others show the horseshoe profile that came from the East. The capitals alternate foliage with frontal human figures, and among the blind double windows one scene is recognisable as an Annunciation; in the lunette above the doorway what survives, in part, is the Purification that gives the church its name. Higher up opens a large splayed oculus that once held a spoked wheel. Inside, the plan is basilican, without a transept, with three naves and three semicircular apses; the central nave is roofed with wooden trusses, the side ones with masonry cross vaults.
The crypt is the oldest part and the one that repays the visit most: a Romanesque mosaic floor with animal figures, capitals, cornices and column shafts salvaged from the front of the earlier church, and a marble slab of 1238 that served as the cover of the well where the relics of Saint Timothy were found. Those of Saint Bassus, the city's patron, had come to light in 1760.
Our editors' tip
Walk along the flank of the building before going in: the blind arcading on slender pilaster strips runs the whole length, and in the fifth arch, at plinth level, there is a small door that almost nobody notices. Then look in the first bay on the right for the L-shaped stone bench with its carved slab. The bell tower, far later and repaired again and again, looks as if it belonged to another church: proof that this cathedral has been taken apart and put back together several times, and that its present appearance comes from twentieth-century restorations which stripped away nearly all the Baroque.