In 1163, a monk named Pantaleone began laying a mosaic across the entire floor of Otranto's cathedral with a team of fellow monks from the nearby abbey of San Nicola di Casole, finishing two years later: a Tree of Life rooted in two elephants, its branches carrying Adam and Eve, King Arthur, Alexander the Great and the months of the year, an entire medieval worldview worked in stone.
The nave floats above a crypt forested with more than seventy columns pulled from earlier Roman and medieval buildings. In the right aisle, glass cases hold the skulls of the eight hundred townspeople the Ottomans beheaded on Otranto's hill in 1480 for refusing to renounce their faith; the church canonized them as martyrs in 2013. Look up at the wooden ceiling too, painted black, white and gold when an archbishop added it in 1698, still running the length of the nave.
Sources and citations (3)
- Catalogo Generale dei Beni CulturaliChiesa Cattedrale di OtrantoCathedral recordRead source
- Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le province di Brindisi, Lecce e TarantoAuthorization for completion of archaeometric analyses on the Cathedral pavement mosaicAuthorization descriptionRead source
- Comune di OtrantoUn incontro presso il Museo Castromediano di Lecce dedicato al mosaico nella contemporaneitàMunicipal preservation contextRead source
