In the archbishop’s palace in Bari, in two rooms almost no visitor walks through, there are four parchments metres long that solve an eleventh-century communication problem in a way nobody would use today, and that is ingenious.
They are the Exultet scrolls, and some of the oldest that survive are kept here. There is no queue for them, they never make the cover, and they cost four euros. If I had to name the thing in Bari that most deserves the journey and is least talked about, I would name this without hesitating.
An Easter chant, and an object built to be looked at
You have to start from the rite, or the object makes no sense.
On the night between Holy Saturday and Easter, the Latin liturgy provides for the blessing of the paschal candle, and the chant that accompanies it takes its name from its first word: Exultet iam angelica turba caelorum, let the angelic host of heaven rejoice. It is a praeconium, a solemn proclamation, and the deacon sings it from the ambo, the raised pulpit, before a dark church in which the only light is the candle just lit.
The text is long. In the Middle Ages it was written not in a book but on a parchment scroll, sewn from several sheets, which the deacon unrolled by hand as he sang, letting it fall along the parapet of the ambo.
And this is where somebody, in southern Italy between the tenth and the eleventh century, had the idea.
The images are painted upside down, and it is not a mistake
Looking at an open Exultet, your first reaction is that it has been mounted wrongly. The miniatures are the right way up and the text beneath each of them is upside down. Or, depending on how you hold it, the text is upright and the figures are on their heads.
Why paint the figures upside down? It is not a mistake, it is the design. As the deacon sings, the scroll descends in front of him along the lectern and then along the parapet of the ambo: the part already sung flips over and hangs down, facing the nave. The text is written the right way up for him, who has to read it; the pictures are painted the right way up for the people below, who cannot read the text and would not understand it anyway, because it is in Latin.
In a dark church, with a single candle lit, while a man sings in a language you do not know, the images of what he is saying scroll past your eyes one after another, in the right order. It is a narrative device synchronised to a live soundtrack, built in the eleventh century out of parchment and fish glue.
And why not every scholar believes that explanation
It has to be said that the ambo story, however fine and however often repeated, is not universally accepted, and it is worth knowing before you tell anyone else it is a fact.
There are two objections, and they are serious. The first is that not all the surviving scrolls have the reversal: the later ones lack it, and if the device had really been essential to the liturgy it is hard to see why it would be abandoned. The second is that not every medieval ambo had a parapet fit to let five metres of parchment hang without crumpling.
Alternative answers exist: some think the reversal served those standing beside the deacon rather than below him, some read it as a scribal convention rather than a functional one, some suppose the scrolls were also displayed outside the liturgy.
I tell it as the museum tells it, and as most handbooks do, because it remains the most economical explanation of a strange material fact. But «most likely explanation» and «established fact» are two different things, and in a four-euro museum with no audio guide nobody will tell you so.
Exultet 1 of Bari: 525 centimetres, eight sheets
Of the four scrolls kept here, the one that counts is the first.
Exultet 1 measures 525 centimetres and is made of eight sheets of parchment sewn in sequence. The accepted dating places it between 1025 and 1030, which makes it one of the oldest that survive and the parent of the Bari group. It was written and painted in the city, in the episcopal scriptorium or in that of the monastery of San Benedetto, which was the best-equipped cultural centre in Bari.
The style is Byzantine, and that is not a scholarly detail: in 1025 Bari was not yet Norman, it was the capital of the catapanate, the principal Byzantine city in Italy. The colours are those of Eastern painting, muted and noble, olive green, yellow ochre, violet, very different from the brightness of contemporary Western manuscripts. Two ornamental bands run along the margins, populated with medallions holding busts of saints.
The scenes, and the two emperors who date the scroll
The figural repertoire of Exultet 1 follows the text step by step, and keeps a historical surprise for the end.
There is Christ in a mandorla carried by angels, the angels of judgement, the tetramorph with the symbols of the four evangelists, the Earth shown as a young woman after a type that comes straight from antiquity, the benedictio cerei, the blessing of the candle itself, a Christ Pantocrator, the Anastasis, which is the Greek way of showing the Resurrection with Christ pulling Adam and Eve out of Limbo, and a singular circular wind rose with Christ at the centre.
And then, as the text of the praeconium requires, there are the authorities prayed for: the spiritual and the temporal. The temporal authority here is two Byzantine emperors, identified with reasonable confidence as Basil II and Constantine VIII.
How do you date a parchment that carries no date? This is the part I like most, because it is a case of an object dating itself. Basil II died in 1025 and Constantine VIII reigned alone until 1028: a scroll praying for both as reigning sovereigns must belong to those years. The scholars’ reasoning and the dating to 1025-1030 fit together, and it is rare for a medieval manuscript to be so courteous.
The praise of the bees, and why an Easter chant talks about wax
What is a hymn to bees doing inside a proclamation of the Resurrection? There is a passage in the Exultet that disorients anyone hearing it for the first time. In the middle of a proclamation about the Resurrection, the text starts praising bees.
It is not a digression. The paschal candle is made of wax, wax is made by bees, and the Latin liturgy draws from that an explicit tribute to their labour: the Church offers this sacrifice of praise obtained de operibus apum, from the work of bees. In medieval theology the bee becomes a figure of Mary’s virginity, because it was thought to reproduce without mating, and the wax that burns without smearing becomes a figure of Christ.
The illuminators enjoyed themselves. In the scrolls the bee passage almost always produces a scene of country life out of keeping with everything else: trees, hives, men gathering honey, swarms drawn as clouds of dots.
The image below is not from a Bari scroll: it comes from the Barberini Exultet in the Vatican, and it is the most legible one in the public domain. I include it because it shows two things at once: what the bee panel looks like, and how the reversal works, with the text upside down beneath the upright scene.
Beneventan of the Bari type, a hand you recognise at a glance
There is one last reason these scrolls matter, and it has nothing to do with the pictures.
They are written in Beneventan, the book hand that developed in Lombard southern Italy from the eighth century and stayed in use for more than five hundred years, the only case in Europe of a regional minuscule surviving Caroline for so long. It has an unmistakable look, broken, with letters that seem cut rather than written.
Within Beneventan, palaeographers distinguish two main variants, and one is called precisely of the Bari type: rounder, with different ligatures, produced in the Apulian Adriatic area as against the Cassinese variant of the Tyrrhenian side.
Put another way: these four scrolls are not just four fine manuscripts that ended up in Bari by chance. They are the proof that in eleventh-century Bari there was a school of writing with a character of its own, recognisable from one end of Europe to the other. A city with its own graphic style is a city with a learned class, a book market and patrons.
The other two scrolls, and the third with no pictures
The museum also displays the other three pieces, and it is worth knowing what to expect because they are very different from one another.
Exultet 2 is about four metres long and is the one with the brightest colours: you can see that the illuminator had the older scroll in front of him and reinterpreted it with a palette of his own, more Western.
Exultet 3 is the shortest, a little under three metres, and belongs to the thirteenth century. It is also the most disappointing for anyone who has come for the pictures, because it has none at all: only text and musical notation. That fact says something precise, and it is the same objection scholars raise against the ambo theory: by the thirteenth century the illustrated scroll had stopped being necessary, and what remained was the deacon’s chant book.
The fourth piece is not an Exultet but a Benedictional, datable to about the middle of the eleventh century, covering the other blessings of the Easter vigil, that of the new fire and that of the baptismal water.
What else is in the museum
The Diocesan Museum is not only the Exultets, even though they are the reason to go.
The rooms hold liturgical vestments, goldsmiths’ work, sculpture, paintings from the fourteenth century onwards and a collection of silver, among which stands out the reliquary bust of Saint Sabinus, the cathedral’s titular bishop, in gilded silver with mitre and crozier. It is the kind of object found everywhere in the south and looked at by almost nobody, and it tells you a great deal about the wealth of Apulian churches under Spanish rule.
The display is recent, modern, with a multimedia route supporting the reading of the scrolls. It is a small museum, well kept, with no crowds.
Thirty scrolls in the world, and three of them are here
To grasp how rare what you see in Bari is, one number helps: about thirty Exultet scrolls survive in all, scattered between Montecassino, the Vatican, Troia, Salerno, Capua, Gaeta, Pisa, London and Paris.
They were nearly all produced in southern Italy between the tenth and the fourteenth century, and they are an exclusively southern phenomenon: in the rest of Europe the Easter proclamation was sung from a book. The illustrated scroll is a local invention, born in the Beneventan area and spread along both coasts.
Among those that survive, the Bari Exultets are among the oldest. It is one of those sentences that appears in guidebooks as municipal boasting and that here is simply a bibliographical fact.
Practical information
Checked on 2 September 2026 on the Artecclesiae site of the archdiocese of Bari-Bitonto, which runs the box office for the cathedral and the museum.
Tickets. The Museum of the Exultet costs 4 euros full and 3 reduced. The combined ticket with the cathedral of San Sabino, which includes the crypt and the archaeological area of the succorpo, costs 9 euros full, 7 reduced and 20 for the family rate. Children up to ten, disabled visitors, religious, tourist guides, teachers and university students on certain courses do not pay.
Opening hours. The museum follows the cathedral’s hours: every day from 9 am to 9 pm from April to September and from 9 am to 7 pm from October to March, last entry a quarter of an hour before. It does not close on any day of the week.
Where it is. In the archbishop’s palace, strada dei Dottula, inside the old town, beside the cathedral.
How long it takes. Half an hour for the scrolls, forty minutes with the other rooms. Take the time to follow one scroll from end to end rather than stopping at the first miniature: the sequence is the point.
One practical tip worth more than the rest. Come here after the cathedral, not before. The fragments of Byzantine fresco in the succorpo and these scrolls are the same culture thirty years apart, and seen in the right order they explain each other.
If you are building an itinerary, the museum is the third stop of day one in What to see in Bari in 2 days, and it stands beside the cathedral of San Sabino.
Photo credits: Bari Exultet miniatures and bust of Saint Sabinus by Benjamin Smith, scroll in the case of the Diocesan Museum by Luistxo (CC BY-SA 4.0); Beneventan scroll from Pisa cathedral by Sailko (CC BY 3.0); bee panel of the Barberini Exultet, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, public domain. All from Wikimedia Commons.
