In 1248 Frederick the Second razed the fortress of Nocera to the ground, and inside the fortress stood the cathedral. The city did not rebuild it at once: the works began in 1448, exactly two centuries later. For two hundred years the people of Nocera lived with the ruins of their chief church, and the front you see today was only finished in the twentieth century.
What to see
Of the first Romanesque cathedral there remains the doorway on the left flank, the one piece that escaped the destruction. The bell tower was completed in the mid sixteenth century; then in the eighteenth the interior was redone in late baroque, with a single nave, side chapels, a semicircular apse and a dense decoration of stuccoes.
In the chapels are canvases and frescoes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The one under the town's patronage was entrusted to Giulio Cesare Angeli, who painted there an Assumption with saints Charles Borromeo and Anne and two canvases with the Annunciation and the Presentation at the Temple. Under the high altar rest the relics of saint Rinaldo, patron of the city, brought here at the end of the fifteenth century.
Visiting
The cathedral is at the top of the old town of Nocera Umbra; after the earthquake of the late nineties the town lived for years with building sites, so it is worth checking openings and hours before climbing up. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
Before going in, walk round to the left flank and look for the Romanesque doorway. It is the only thing left of the church the emperor had pulled down, and it is some centuries older than everything around it. Old churches are read this way: from the piece that does not match the others.