THE relics of Saint Nicholas at Bari were stolen from Myra, and their arrival in 1087 heralded the great age of Apulian Romanesque architecture. This owed much to the prosperity assured by Norman rule. Robert Guiscard, already Duke of Apulia and Calabria, took Bari in 1071, and his successors ruled a strongly centralized kingdom that benefited both from the First Crusade and from trade with the East. The great basilica, defended by precinct walls, was not consecrated until 1197. Only a few hundred metres away, across the heart of what survives of the early city, is the cathedral. This was reconstructed in evident emulation of the basilica after Bari was sacked in 1156 by King William the Bad. Yet marvellous as the conjunction of the two buildings is, it is not Bari but its neighbour Bitonto, some seventeen kilometres inland to the west, that lingers in the imagination.
Unlike medieval Bari, the historic centre of Bitonto has not been swallowed by the modern town. Its plan survives, with twisting streets following the contours of the ground, punctuated by palaces with baroque portals or sixteenth-century loggias. Of these, the finest is in the Renaissance Palazzo Sylos Labini on the Via Planelli; it incorporates a Gothic doorway in the Catalan style that reflects the long Aragonese domination of the south heralded by the succession of Alfonso of Aragon to the kingdom of Naples in 1442. The palace is now a museum.
Cathedral.
The cathedral of San Valentino, orientated to the south-east, flanks a narrow piazza at the very core of the town. It was built on the site of a much earlier church, the recently excavated remains of which, with fragmentary walls and sections of a mosaic, underlie the nave. Later alterations to the Romanesque structure were successfully reversed in the last century. Like the cathedral at Bari, that at Bitonto was inspired by the basilica there. The general disposition is the same, with a tall nave flanked by aisles only slightly lower, the soaring transepts, the three apses. But here the lateral façade facing the piazza, with the loggia of six recessed arches below elaborate clerestory windows and the blind arcading of the transept, surpasses its predecessor. The main façade is majestic, although the portico was never finished. The central door is richly decorated: the columns are supported on beasts and the architraves carved with scenes from the Christmas story and the Descent into Limbo. A rose window with more animals is set high in the central gable which is capped by a blind arcade.
The interior, like its counterparts at Bari, has been ruthlessly restored – English has no precise equivalent of the Italian ripristinato – but its scale has not been falsified, and the way the presbytery is raised above the level of the nave is both visually satisfying and functionally appropriate. One significant original fitting survives, the elaborately decorated ambo of 1229, signed by ‘Nicolaus sacerdos et magister’. The later tombs are of less interest.
Cathedral, crypt: capital.
Flights of steps lead down to the most thrilling of all Apulian crypts. Like the presbytery above, this has three apses. It is supported on thirty columns. The capitals are of exceptional quality, with bulls, pigs and other animals, humans in varying attitudes and vigorous foliage, as imaginative in design and sharp in detail as any of their date elsewhere in Italy or indeed in France. The sacristan knows not to rush the visitor.
As artists painted sequences of related pictures, so builders and craftsmen left clusters of closely interrelated monuments. Those who respond to the magic of Bitonto may wish to see two nearby cathedrals that also reflect the basilica of Bari: Ruvo, the steep triangular outline of which is explained by the narrow width of the central nave; and Bitetto, most memorable for the façade that was rebuilt in 1335, as a prominent inscription attests, by Lillo from Barletta.