About Acerenza Cathedral

The present cathedral of Acerenza, dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta and to Saint Canius, was begun in the late 11th century at the initiative of the Norman archbishop Arnaldo of Saint-Évroult, a trusted figure of Robert Guiscard, and completed in the early decades of the 12th century with the help of French craftsmen supplied by the Normans, rising on the site of an earlier paleochristian cult building recorded from 1059. According to tradition, not fully verified by historical sources, the relics of Saint Canius — a bishop of Acerenza martyred in the 4th or 5th century — were transferred to the church from Atella in Campania in 799 under Bishop Leone II; his sarcophagus in the crypt has long been associated with local devotional legends, including reports of a miraculous “holy manna” said to have oozed from it and of his pastoral staff relic moving on its own. In the first half of the 1500s, the crypt beneath the presbytery was entirely restructured and consecrated in 1524 by Count Giacomo Alfonso Ferrillo, lord of Acerenza, and his wife Maria Balsa, whose combined patronage left the crypt decorated with an unusual mixture of Christian and classical iconographic motifs — sirens, tritons, a Christ Confessor, and fauns playing the flute. Local tradition holds that Maria Balsa was the daughter of a Balkan despot, orphaned at the age of seven and brought to Italy under the protection of King Alfonso of Aragon in Naples, who arranged her later marriage to Count Ferrillo; a persistent regional legend identifies her father as Vlad III of Wallachia, the historical prince behind the Dracula legend, pointing to the Balsa family’s heraldic device — a winged dragon surmounted by a star, a symbol associated with the Order of the Dragon into which Vlad’s own father had been inducted — still visible on the cathedral’s facade today.