Discover Anagni Cathedral

Anagni Cathedral, dedicated to the Annunciation of the Virgin, holds the cathedra of the diocese of Anagni-Alatri. It was built in Romanesque style between 1072 and 1104, under the patronage of the Byzantine emperor Michael VII Doukas.

The interior was refurbished in 1250 and is Gothic-Lombard in character. Its pavement, of 1231, is Cosmatesque mosaic. Over the main portal a lunette of the late thirteenth century shows the Madonna and child between Saints Magnus and Secondina, and the ciborium above the high altar was finished by Vassalletto in 1267. The apostles frescoed on the apse walls are seventeenth-century work by Borgogna; the half-dome of the apse was painted in the nineteenth century.

It was built with Byzantine money, between 1072 and 1104. The bishop Pietro da Salerno raised it, funded by the munificence of the Eastern emperor Michael VII Doukas -- a Romanesque cathedral in central Italy paid for from Constantinople. The crypt went up at the same time as the church above it rather than being inherited from an earlier building, which is why the two share a plan.

The inside was rebuilt a century and a half later and the outside was not. In 1250 Bishop Pandolfo had the wooden trusses over the nave and transept taken out and replaced with Gothic arches, which is why a Romanesque exterior opens into a Gothic-Lombard interior. The fabric of the facade was left as it was, and still reads as the eleventh-century building.

The floors arrived before the furniture. The Cosmati laid the church pavement in 1231 and Cosma di Jacopo di Lorenzo and his sons the crypt pavement between 1224 and 1231; Vassalletto's throne, ciborium and paschal column came a generation later, in the 1260s.

What is missing is the part the history books name. The rooms where Boniface VIII was seized in 1303 -- the Outrage of Anagni -- adjoined the cathedral and were reached through the cloister. Both the rooms and the cloister are gone, so the single most famous event associated with this building has no fabric left to stand in.

The twentieth century worked on the tower. The bell tower was restored in 1938 and given an iron frame inside to carry its five bells, a structural insertion rather than a repair.

What is actually the highlight -- the church or the crypt?

The crypt. Its 540 square metres of twelfth- and thirteenth-century fresco over twenty-one vaults, on an original Cosmatesque floor, is what brings people to Anagni, and it is complete in a way very little medieval painting is.

Why is it called the Sistine Chapel of the Middle Ages?

Because of the scale and the completeness of the programme: the whole story of salvation from the creation of the world to the last judgement, painted across every vault and wall of one room.

Why are Hippocrates and Galen on a church ceiling?

Because one cycle treats the creation as the proportional union of the four elements, with man as a microcosm inside the macrocosm -- a Platonic scheme, and the two physicians belong to the argument rather than decorating it.

Did the Outrage of Anagni happen here?

Next door. Boniface VIII was seized in rooms that adjoined the cathedral through the cloister; both the rooms and the cloister have since disappeared.

Who was canonised here?

Bernard of Clairvaux in 1174 and Clare of Assisi in 1255, among others -- the Italian account also names Edward the Confessor and Saint Peter the hermit. Excommunications went the other way: the antipope Victor IV, Frederick Barbarossa on 24 March 1160, Frederick II and Manfred.

Why did a Byzantine emperor pay for a cathedral in Lazio?

The sources record the fact rather than the motive: the church was raised between 1072 and 1104 by Bishop Pietro da Salerno, funded by the munificence of the Eastern emperor Michael VII Doukas.