Travel time:
20-minute drive | 2 hours and 58 minutes walk

Our rating: To visit

The co-cathedral of Amelia is dedicated to Saint Firmina, the young daughter of the prefect of the city Calpurnio, who lived at the time of Emperor Diocletian. The Passio of the sixth century tells that Firmina retired after the death of her father near Amelia. In Amelia the magistrate Olympias converted to Christianity and for her faith she was imprisoned and sentenced to death. His remains were found in the eleventh century and deposited in the church erected in his honor on the top of the hill of Amelia.
The current building is the result of a heavy transformation carried out between 1630 and 1639. The reconstruction became necessary following the disastrous fire of 1629, which destroyed part of the medieval church dating back to the XI-XII century, already strongly compromised by the raids of the troops of Frederick II. The visit itinerary starts from the outdoor balcony from which you can admire, among other things, one of the most evocative landscapes of the city and the Amerini hills. On the other side of the road on which the church overlooks you can appreciate the bishop’s palace, where St. Maximilian Kolbe stayed for a short period and, a little further, the square built around the seminary building that is the backdrop to the urban space of the acropolis reserved for the ecclesiastical government in which it rises, for just over thirty meters, The bell tower. Built in the eleventh century, it is now one of the rare architectural specimens set on a dodecagonal plan, with Roman bare materials and some stone fragments added over the centuries between friezes, tombstones, fragments of columns and finally a seventeenth-century sundial. The upper register of the barrel is decorated with a double row of blind mullioned windows, above which rests the open-air belfry and today can be visited by the public where there are five bells, the oldest of which dates back to 1626 and is the work of Giovanni Battista Veneroso from Pavia.