Are you planning a tour of Puglia and want to know more about the beautiful cathedral of Ruvo?
You’re in the right place!
Puglia is a wonderful region, with endless landscapes and artistic treasures. It has some splendid cathedrals in the Apulian Romanesque style, and among them the cathedral of Ruvo di Puglia stands out for its originality, in a small inland town.
The co-cathedral of Ruvo di Puglia, dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta, is one of the most important examples of Apulian Romanesque: it’s the town’s most important church and the heart of its old centre.
I had the chance to visit Ruvo during one of my trips to Matera, which I really recommend, and which is fairly close if you get around by car.
But what is there to see?
In this article I’ll tell you what struck me most and the story of this stone lady, whose roots reach all the way back to prehistory.
Let’s go!
A short history of Ruvo di Puglia
To really understand this town, I thought I’d tell you a little about its ancient history too. Nothing boring or complicated: just enough to give you a sense of how important this area has been since the earliest times.
The origins of Ruvo are very ancient and reach back to prehistory: finds here attest to settlements from the Palaeolithic and the first villages from around 6000 BC. Originally, by the way, Ruvo didn’t stand where it is today, but on top of the hill between the town pinewood and the church of San Michele Arcangelo.
One of its finest moments was when ancient Rubi became an important centre of the Peucetians, famous throughout the Mediterranean for its pottery and in close trade contact with Greece: it minted its own coinage and was a crossroads of exchange with the other Italic peoples.
From Roman times comes a legend instead: it’s said that a first diocese arose at Ruvo at the wish of Saint Peter, who appointed Saint Cletus as its bishop. Real decline came with the fall of the Roman Empire and the Gothic invasions, which almost completely destroyed the town. Its revival coincided with the Norman-Swabian period: these are the very years of Frederick II of Swabia and his nearby Castel del Monte, although the cathedral you see today was not his work but the fruit of a long building process between the 12th and 13th centuries.
Let me tell you about it now.
The cathedral of Ruvo
If you’ve seen other religious buildings in Puglia, you’ll have noticed that the model of the cathedral of Ruvo echoes that of many nearby churches. The façade features a succession of gables of different heights, a great central rose window (with twelve rays, added in the 16th century) and a wealth of fanciful, fascinating sculptures all around. Here, more than elsewhere, the shape of the gables is very pronounced.
As in other churches of the same age, graceful little arches trace the outline of the structure, supported by little leaves and animals (look for the lions and griffins!). Inside the cathedral of Ruvo, instead, note the capitals, the surviving fragments of fresco, the medieval sculptures and the tombstones worn by time.
The hypogeum of the cathedral
The real treasure of the cathedral of Ruvo, though, is what lies beneath it.
Entry to the hypogeum costs just a few euros (around €2, a trifling sum) and lets you discover the most interesting corners of this layered structure. Here, under the church floor, you can read Ruvo’s whole history.
The first thing you’ll notice are some Peucetian burials, from the pre-Roman population (next to a kiln, which shows the area was also inhabited). Then you’ll find the mosaics of a Roman domus, built here between the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Finally, you can see the foundation and one of the walls of the earlier cathedral, dating from the early 11th century and probably collapsed around 1088: today’s structure, built between the 12th and 13th centuries, still rests on these ancient bases.
Another curiosity: the bell tower, detached from the body of the church, is older than it. It was originally a square defensive tower dating from around the year 1000; the two upper levels were added in the 18th century.
Not just the cathedral: the Talos Krater
For me it was worth going to Ruvo just for the cathedral. But if you have time, don’t miss the Jatta National Archaeological Museum, housed in the neoclassical Palazzo Jatta: it’s one of the few nineteenth-century private collections to have survived with its original layout, with over two thousand artefacts found almost entirely in the area.
Its most famous piece is the Talos Krater, a large Attic red-figure vase from the 5th century BC depicting the death of the bronze giant Talos, guardian of Crete, as he succumbs to Medea’s spells and is held up by Castor and Pollux. It’s considered one of the absolute masterpieces of Greek vase painting. One more good reason to stop in this small town.
If you love Apulian Romanesque, from here you can easily continue to other wonders of the region: nearby Trani with its cathedral by the sea, the trulli of Alberobello or the Sassi of Matera.
So, are you ready to descend beneath this stone lady?
