For thirteen years the cathedral of Matera was the building everyone photographed and nobody could visit. It reopened in March 2016, and in many guidebooks printed before then it is still dismissed in two lines.
That is a pity, because it is the monument that holds the whole history of the city together. It stands on the Civita, the spur that separates the Sasso Caveoso from the Sasso Barisano, on the highest and oldest point: from up there the two districts fall away on either side, and the cathedral is literally the reason there are two of them.
Inside, the Apulian Romanesque of the structure was covered over by the Baroque in the seventeenth century, and beneath the Baroque frescoes have surfaced that nobody expected. It is a stratification, not a building.
Thirteen years of closure, and a carved date
What kept the mother church of a city shut for thirteen years? Two collapses. The first in 2003, the second in 2006: the church was closed for safety and reopened only after seismic strengthening and a complete restoration, on 5 March 2016.
Anyone who visited Matera before that date remembers the cranes in front of the façade, spoiling the city’s most photographed view from the terrace of Piazza Vittorio Veneto. They are gone now.
The date of birth, on the other hand, is written on the wall. An inscription inside the church reads mille ducenteni erat annus septuagenus dum fuit completa domus spectamine leta: it was the year 1270 when this house was completed, joyful to behold. Work had begun in 1230, at the wish of Frederick II of Swabia: forty years on site, which for a medieval cathedral is quick.
The façade and the sixteen-spoke rose window
The façade faces east, onto a narrow square, and has to be seen from close up because it is all in the detail.
The finest piece is the sixteen-spoke rose window, flanked by four small columns and crowned by the archangel Michael trampling the dragon. From the gable hang twelve pendant columns resting on telamones. Four and twelve are not arbitrary numbers: they are the evangelists and the apostles. Nor is sixteen, because the medieval rose window is read as the wheel of life, turning and alternating those who rise with those who fall.
Beside it rises the bell tower, 52 metres high, square in plan and divided into four tiers of openings that widen as they climb. It is the silhouette you recognise in every photograph of Matera taken from the Murgia, and together with the rose window it states where the building belongs: this is Apulian Romanesque, the same family as the basilica of San Nicola in Bari and the cathedral of Ruvo di Puglia, with the addition of Arab and Byzantine accents visible here in the interlace of the side doorways.
The Baroque that covered the Romanesque
You go in expecting a Romanesque church and find a church of gold. The contrast is brutal, and it is not a flaw: it is the building’s history.
Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the interior was entirely refaced: gilded coffered ceiling, altars of polychrome marble, stuccoes, canvases. The Romanesque columns with their capitals are still there, but the space reads as a southern Baroque church.
The restoration that followed the collapses did something nobody had planned: by removing layers and moving structures it brought back to light the medieval paintings that the seventeenth-century refacing had covered and, unintentionally, protected. The two periods now coexist in plain sight, and the visit consists largely of hunting for the older one inside the more recent.
The Madonna della Bruna and the master who takes her name
The most important image in the cathedral is not an altarpiece: it is a fresco of 1270, the Madonna della Bruna, the city’s patron.
The feast dedicated to her, on 2 July, is the day Matera genuinely stops, with the triumphal papier-mâché cart carried in procession and then pulled apart piece by piece by the crowd. If you happen to be in town that day, bear in mind that every site in the rupestrian circuit is closed.
The fresco is attributed to an anonymous painter whom scholars call, precisely on the strength of this work, the Master of the Bruna. The same hand painted the Madonna del Latte a few hundred metres away, inside the rock church of Santa Lucia alle Malve: one in the mother church, the other in a cave, in the same years. Some records attribute the Bruna to Rinaldo da Taranto, the painter of the Last Judgement in this same cathedral, and both readings are in circulation.
The Last Judgement and the choir of 1453
Among the paintings that have resurfaced, the most demanding is a Last Judgement attributed to Rinaldo da Taranto, which the cathedral’s own record dates to the end of the thirteenth century and other sources to the fourteenth.
It is a subject that serves to organise fear, and it should be read in bands: the judge at the top, the separation in the middle, the fate of the damned at the bottom. It is worth stopping for, because very little medieval mural painting of this quality survives in Basilicata.
The other work that repays time is the wooden choir of 1453, sixty stalls in solid walnut carved by Giovanni Tantino of Ariano Irpino with sacred stories, allegorical figures and animals. The bestiary of medieval choirs is not decorative filler: every beast has a codified meaning, and those who sang in there could read it the way we read a road sign.
The stone nativity by Altobello Persio
A chapel opens off the left aisle that justifies the ticket on its own.
The stone nativity, carved between 1530 and 1534 by Altobello Persio together with Sannazzaro di Alessano, is not a nativity scene as we understand one. It is a relief filling the whole wall, with the Nativity inside a cave, the flock, the shepherds, the architecture of a towered city and the Magi arriving from above: a continuous scene, in which time runs from one point of the same surface to another.
Why is the Nativity carved inside a cave rather than under a stable roof? Because in Matera, in 1534, people really were born in caves. The rock cavity is not a generic iconographic device but the way this community pictured a birth under shelter, and Persio’s choice says more than any panel about the relationship between the mother church and the districts below it. Around it survive fragments of thirteenth-century frescoes, and the whole is the most Materan thing the cathedral holds.
Practical information
Details checked on 6 September 2026 on the records of Oltre l’Arte, which runs the cultural route, cross-checked with those of isassidimatera.com. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. The cultural route costs 3.50 euros and is a combined ticket: it covers the visit to the cathedral and entry to the MATA, the Diocesan Museum of Matera, which stands behind the apse on via Riscatto. Visitors accompanied by a licensed tour guide pay 1 euro.
Free entry. Entry is free for clergy, for people with disabilities, for children up to 10, for licensed guides, for journalists and for ICOM members.
Hours. The cultural route with the MATA opens every day 9.00-19.00. Hours change around services, which take precedence over everything.
What is in the MATA. The Diocesan Museum opened in 2011 inside the restored rooms of the former seminary of 1906 and occupies three large halls, with furnishings and sacred silver from the treasury of the cathedral and from the church of Santa Chiara, dating between the eleventh and the nineteenth centuries.
Getting there. The cathedral stands in Piazza Duomo, on the Civita, ten minutes uphill on foot from Piazza Vittorio Veneto. Visitors with mobility difficulties enter from via Riscatto, on the Diocesan Museum side.
How long it takes. The cathedral alone takes forty minutes, if you really go looking for the resurfaced paintings and the choir. With the MATA, an hour and a half.
Careful: this is a working church, not an exhibition hall. On 2 July, the feast of the Madonna della Bruna, the city is celebrating and access follows the events.
Why the climb is worth it
Matera cathedral is not the monument people come here for, and that makes it one of the few visits in Matera you make without a queue.
The reason to make it is that it explains the city better than the viewpoints do: a Romanesque building set on the highest point to govern two carved districts, covered in gold when the poverty of the place was already proverbial, and under that gold a thirteenth century that came back into view only thanks to two collapses.
For the rest, my guide on what to see in Matera lines up the main stops, the carved churches are in the article on the rock churches and the Murgia park, and beneath the square where you buy the ticket lies the Palombaro Lungo.
Photographs: the flank of the cathedral and the 1270 inscription by Diego Baglieri, the façade and the nave by Holger Uwe Schmitt, Persio’s nativity by Enric, all CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons.
