Gerace’s cathedral is the largest church in Calabria, a Byzantine-Norman basilica of roughly 1,700 square meters built in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries on a rock crag above the Ionian coast.
Three naves are divided by twenty granite and marble columns, some recovered from the ruins of ancient Locri, so the nave reads like a catalogue of reused antiquity. Below lies the crypt, the oldest part of the complex, with a fourteenth-century marble Madonna and the diocesan treasury, which includes a twelfth-century silver Stauroteca. Around it, the medieval upper town survives so intact that film crews use it as a stand-in for the Middle Ages.
