ATRI stands back from the Adriatic, surveying a wide swathe of the coastal plain. The ancient Roman town commanded the road to Pescara and the place continued to have a certain importance. With the disintegration of the empire of the Hohenstaufen, Atri was subsumed by the duchy of Spoleto and then taken by other local powers. But in 1395 the signoria passed to the Acquaviva family, who would retain it until 1775 when Atri was absorbed into the kingdom of Naples. It is to the Acquaviva dukes that Atri owes many of the monuments that make it one of the most interesting towns of its size in southern Italy.
The much remodelled palace of the Acquaviva now serves as the Municipio. The elaborate portal of the church of Sant’Agostino, attributed to Matteo da Napoli, reflects the late Gothic of that city. But the building that most completely expresses the ambition and taste of the ducal line is the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, which overlies a Roman cistern that can be reached through the Museo Diocesano. This austere structure of Istrian stone with an elegant west entrance and three differing Gothic doors on the south side was rebuilt from c.1280 onwards, and is overlooked by the splendid campanile constructed in 1502–3 by Antonio da Lodi, the Milanese architect who had completed the comparable campanile of the cathedral at nearby Teramo in 1493.
The remarkable cycle of frescoes in the choir represents the high point of Abruzzese Quattrocento painting. Andrea Delitio is an elusive artist, recorded between 1450 and 1473. He clearly knew the work of that subtle Umbrian counterpart of Sassetta, Bartolomeo di Tommaso da Foligno; he had some knowledge of Uccello and other Florentines of the mid-century; and his delight in colour implies an awareness of the late Gothic painters of Venice, who had so many patrons on the Adriatic coast. Delitio was a narrator of genius, with an instinctive love of anecdote. An almost excessive enthusiasm for perspective characterizes the vault frescoes with saints and virtues – Saint Luke painting an emphatically Quattrocento half-length Madonna, Saint Ambrose seated at a disconcertingly insubstantial table.
Cathedral: Andrea Delitio, Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin (detail).
Cathedral: Andrea Delitio, Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin (detail).
It was when Delitio progressed to the narrative sequences of the walls that his full genius is expressed. These are treated in four tiers, commencing with the story of Joachim and Anna in the lunettes and continuing with the life of the Virgin and the childhood of Christ, concluding with the Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin, her Dormition, Assumption and Coronation. Federico Zeri fairly commented that the cycle is ‘enlivened by a rich and appealing humour’. The viewer is transported to a world that Delitio’s contemporaries would have recognized, with richly detailed architecture and a wealth of subordinate incident. Castles erupt from the hills behind the cavern that serves as stable in Delitio’s Nativity; the train of the Magi moves through a rippling landscape of rounded hillocks; and the Holy Family sets out on the journey to Egypt from a ridge not unlike that on which Atri stands, followed by a heavily laden peasant woman who pays no attention to the eroded ridges that descend precipitously towards the fortress-protected roadstead, in which ships are ready for the voyage. The Virgin is born in a chamber with a chimneypiece of ducal scale and later embroiders under an arcade with a classical festoon. Most extraordinary of all is the fresco of the annunciation of her death, a concertinaed jumble of architectural components enriched with marble facings, in which Delitio distinguishes, for example, between the rendered front of the distant church and the rough-hewn wall adjoining it; the Virgin’s attendants are caught in arrested motion and only the dog is unaware of the solemnity of the occasion. In four fictive openings above the arches that flank the choir there are startlingly realistic portraits: the Acquaviva – if such they were – are unexpectedly animated. And it is not difficult to understand why they employed Delitio, whose own portrait looks across at theirs and whose frescoes are the enduring legacy of their long-lived signoria.
A few miles to the north of the city in the valley of the Vomano there is a cluster of three medieval churches, beautifully sited Santa Maria di Propezzano and San Clemente al Vomano, both Romanesque, and San Salvatore at Morro d’Oco, built in 1331.
