Church of San Benedetto Abate

When Cetraro passed to the abbey of Montecassino in 1086, the monks chose for their spiritual house a place “at the top of the slope”, just outside the settlement of the time, and dedicated it to the founder of their order. The Church of San Benedetto Abate first appears in a document of 1104 and soon became a priory where, the chronicles say, the monks praised God day and night; in the 14th century disputes with the secular clergy turned it into a parish church, “mother and head” of all the clergy of Cetraro. The tower beside it, already called “lo campanaro” in 1540, is the only survivor of the towers that ringed the medieval castrum.

Today’s building is a child of the 18th century: in 1750 archpriest Lorenzo De Caro began the enlargement, resumed in 1766 by his successor Policicchio; in 1775 the marble statue of Saint Benedict was set over the main portal and on 28 October 1779 the building was celebrated as complete. The façade, divided by pilasters and topped by a triangular pediment, faces a forecourt closed in by noble palaces in the mid-1800s. The interior is a Latin cross, with three naves and five bays a side: a wooden choir of 1822, the mid-19th-century choir loft, Francesco Basile’s canvas of the Madonna with the souls in Purgatory (1793), the wooden group of the Madonna del Rosario, the Baroque altar of the Addolorata and, on the vault, the early-19th-century Last Judgement with the biblical frescoes added in 1898 by Rocco Ferrari. The 18th-century organ, restored in 1990, with music-making angels and carved festoons, is singled out by scholars as one of the most refined examples of Neapolitan organ culture in Calabria. From here, every 11 July, the statue of the saint sets out for the sea procession.