CASARANO. - A locality in Apulia, on the Salento peninsula, birthplace of Pope Boniface IX (Pietro Tomacelli: 1389-1404); after falling into decline and finally being destroyed, it was replaced by the nearby Casarano.
Today all that remains is the ancient parish church, S. Maria della Croce, with three naves divided by pillars; there are fragments of 12th-century frescoes, and a portrait of Urban VI, who had given the cardinal's hat to Pietro Tomacelli. It constitutes the enlargement of an older building, with a cruciform plan, whose eastern arm has disappeared to make room for the central nave, very similar, even in its dimensions, to the Ravenna mausoleum of Galla Placidia. The chapel, otherwise intact, with its characteristic irregular masonry and well-built arches, as at Canosa, preserves part of its mosaic decoration, almost entirely in multicolored stones. In the central small dome it presents a starry sky side, in two tones of blue, at whose apex stands out a Latin cross in tesserae of yellow stone; on the pendentives unfold volutes of acanthus foliage; the arches are bordered by a festoon of leaves between two bands set with gems; only one of the barrel vaults of the arms of the cross is still decorated, down to the springing, by two lateral zones, bounded by a braid and by a serpentine motif intertwining inward in sinuous lines, so as to frame round or trapezoidal fields within which are animals or fruits and flowers; between these two compositions is a broad band of pinecone scales in various hues, and the whole is enclosed by five borders with gems, braid, foreshortened beams and running dogs. On the background of this same arm, which may be called apsidal, also because the foot of the cross that is in the cupola turns toward it, are remains of a mosaic figuration, of which there survives part of a celestial hem bordered in red, on a blue background speckled with dark tesserae, in all likelihood belonging to an image of the Virgin with the Child in her lap, of which perhaps an echo is found in the effigy of the same, placed on one of the pillars, datable to the 12th century. These mosaics, the only survivors in all of Apulia, are not without echoes of those of Ravenna and of other Italian monuments, as well as of kindred products of Syria and Africa, understandable in a region which, though it could not remain extraneous to the artistic movement of the peninsula, was at the same time obviously subject to the influences of the schools of the East and of the opposite shore of the Mediterranean. They are to be dated, like the chapel itself, to the 5th century.
Bibliography2 works
Renato Bartoccini