Old town of Cetraro

Cetraro Paese perches 120 metres above the sea, on the southern side of the valley of the Aron stream. When it was a fortified town it was entered through three gates: di Mare, di Basso and di Sopra, which still mark its entrances. Inside, the monuments face little squares with ancient names: “a giorgia”, where the market was once held, and “miezzu a curta”, in the centre of the old village, not far from the Palazzo Badiale, “a curti”, the temporal seat of the abbots of Montecassino. At the fountain of the Statua dei Sette Mari the people of Cetraro still come to drink.

Besides the mother church of San Benedetto, the old town keeps the Chiesa del Ritiro, Santa Maria delle Grazie, of 1454: Renaissance in style, with a marble altarpiece of the same period, a 16th-century tuff portal and late-Baroque elements, sacked several times by Turks and Saracens and restored in the early 1800s; next to it, a medieval convent has housed the sisters of Saint John the Baptist since 1912. The Church of San Nicola probably dates from the mid-11th century. The Church of San Pietro Apostolo was born as the church of San Sebastiano of the Capuchin friary, founded in 1618 with the first stone laid in procession and completed in 1634 with eighteen cells and a garden; in 1710 its guardian was Friar Angelo d’Acri, later beatified, who in 1737 gave the group of the Madonna Addolorata. Suppressed in 1811 and closed for good around 1865, the friary left the church, a parish since 1923, the 17th-century polyptych of the high altar and the painting of the Last Supper.