A monumental staircase climbs from Piazza Duomo to the atrium of Amalfi Cathedral, with the bell tower beside the church. The present Romanesque façade, on which Enrico Alvino and Guglielmo Raimondi worked, was completed in 1891 after the Baroque front collapsed in 1861. The façade restoration was completed in 2020. The rebuilt front frames a much older sanctuary.
The bronze doors make Amalfi’s seaborne connections tangible. The Comune’s visitor account says they were made in Constantinople and donated in 1060 by the Amalfitan merchant Pantaleone de Comite. Beyond them, a coffered ceiling and eighteenth-century paintings sit alongside twisted columns and ambones from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, making the cathedral’s layered chronology visible.
The cathedral’s reused materials reward a closer look. Its baptismal font is a porphyry basin from an ancient Roman villa; nearby, two ancient Egyptian granite columns from Paestum support the triumphal arch. These objects and materials from different places and periods found new roles within the church.
Keep the adjoining buildings distinct as you continue. The Basilica del Crocifisso, an older church dating to the ninth century and built above an earlier Christian structure, now houses the Diocesan Museum; the Paradise Cloister is a separate funerary courtyard, commissioned for Amalfi’s noble families in 1268 and known for its interlaced arches. For the town beyond the cathedral square, continue with our Amalfi guide.
The Comune dates the foundation of Sant’Andrea to 987 under Duke Mansone I and records a major enlargement in the early thirteenth century associated with Cardinal Pietro Capuano, who brought the relics of Saint Andrew to Amalfi in 1208. Those are milestones in a layered complex, not a date for all of its visible fabric: the present façade was completed in 1891, the neighbouring Basilica del Crocifisso preserves an older church, and the Paradise Cloister was built for a different funerary purpose.
