The Amalfi Cathedral in Italy

This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.

Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!

In my last Italy post, I described a day trip that we took along the Amalfi Coast. However, I did leave out one significant activity, because there was just too much to it, and I didn’t want it to overwhelm my description of the rest of the things we did. So now, as a stand alone post, I give you the Amalfi Cathedral Complex.

This place should really be considered several different venues combined into one, because each one was built at different times for different purposes.

First, when you stand in the piazza and look up at the Cathedral, which is also known as the Cathedral of Saint Andrew, you can’t help but be struck by its unique façade. That’s actually the newest part of the complex. It was added on in the 19^th century, when the original one partially collapsed, and it’s in a Norman/Arab/Byzantine style. It was like no other Cathedral we saw in Italy during our visit. I loved how the gold elements glowed in the sunlight.

After you climb the 62 stairs, you see the bronze doors, which were cast in Constantinople in 1066. But that’s not the way you enter. Instead, you walk across the grand portico, which gave me the feel of Southern Spain. The marble sometimes looked grey and darker grey, and sometimes looked peach and brown, depending on the angle of the light.

Next, we headed into the Paradise Cloister. I’ve always enjoyed how cloisters invite a feeling of peace, quiet, and calm. The cloister was completed in 1268, and there are chapels around the edges where prominent families housed their dead. Some of the original frescoes still remain, in part. They must have been spectacular when they were fresh and new. Oddly, the faces are missing on several of them. There are also several sarcophagi on display, which were, apparently, used over and over again, and there are also elements of some of the cathedral’s original pulpit ornamentation embedded in one wall.

Next, you head into the Diocesan Museum, which is housed in the Basilica of the Crucifix. That was the original church, which was built in the 9^th century on the ruins of a previous temple. The museum houses some of the treasure of the diocese.

In the 10^th century, the current Cathedral was built, and in and 1206, the remains of St Andrew the Apostle were supposedly brought here from Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade. (He is, of course, Amalfi’s patron saint.) The crypt for those remains was built under the current Cathedral in 1208, and you access it by descending some steps from the museum. Some claim that manna issues from the saint’s tomb. (For some odd reason, we took pictures of many elements of the elaborately decorated crypt, but not of the tomb itself. For a look at that, see the video below.)

In the 12^th century, both churches had merged. But eventually, part of that combined church was torn down to make room for the Cloister. Later still, somewhere between 1600 and 1750, the churches became two distinct buildings again. The museum was opened in the old church in 1996.

The cathedral itself is stunning. Our pictures don’t really do it justice. Nor did our brief videos. I found a much better one of the entire complex on YouTube which you can see below.

We left the same way we came: by way of the 62 steps to the piazza. It was almost as if we were descending back into the secular realm. But before we did that, I paused for a moment at the top and looked around. This cathedral, in one form or another, has been taking in this view for hundreds of years. I’m sure it has seen a lot. It makes me wish it could talk.