Salerno

Salerno:

The Town and Cathedral of St Matthew"

The town has a meravellous medieval quarter, its narrow streets running up against dead ends and cobblestoned courtyards. The main thoroughfare here is the Via dei Mercanti - the street of shopkeepers: it still preserves artisan and commercial traditions, the shops selling leather goods and bit of junk.

This medieval centre was once world-famous; it held the first university ever founded, set up in the ninth century by four "masters" a Greek, a Jew, a Saracen and a Latin. The Medical school enjoyed its greatest period of brilliance between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

It was once the most famous in Europe: St Thomas Aquinas mentions it as being pre-eminent in medicine, as Paris was in science and Bologna in law. Accordingly, William the Conqueror's son came here to heal a wound he had received as a Crusader in the Holy Land.

Salerno has a stupendous cathedral, founded in 845 and rebuilt by Robert Guiscard between 1076 and 1085, is very interesting.
he bronze doors of the portal were made in Costantinople and, form 1079 the church has housed the remains of St. Matthew, the bones brought back from Capaccio in 955. (It is strange to think that the bones of both St Matthew and St Andrew -now in Amalfi- should be within such close distance each other.) You'll find these bones in the crypt, the entrance to wich is by a curios ancient bas-relief of a boat form wich men are unloading bales of hay. The saint's tooth is kept in a separate reliquary.

The beautiful cathedral courtyard is sourrended by twenty-eight marble pillars - some Roman, some plundered from Greek temples at Paestum. Around the walls are fourteen ancient sarcophagi, converted by the Normans in Christian sepulchers.

The interior has suffered at the hands of restorers after severe eartquake demage in 1688; but don't miss the twelfht-century pulpits, and the paschal (Easter) candelstick. In their decorations, these show both Arabo-Sicilian and Byzantine motifs.