Trani built its cathedral, dedicated to San Nicola Pellegrino, on a spit of rock between the old harbour and the open Adriatic, so the pale Romanesque facade seems to rise straight out of the water at high tide.
Construction began around 1099 over an earlier church and a Byzantine crypt, and took shape through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the local pink-white stone called pietra di Trani. Barisano da Trani cast the bronze doors in 1175, their panels worked with animals and biblical scenes that still catch the sea light at the top of the double outdoor staircase. Below the main church, the crypt of San Leucio holds an even older, half-buried basilica, with remains of a Roman building and the Byzantine cult of a young Greek shepherd that predates the cathedral by centuries. Fishing boats still moor within sight of the apse.
