CASARANELLO. - A locality in Apulia, in the Salentine peninsula, birthplace of Pope Boniface IX (Pietro Tomacelli: 1389–1404); it later declined and was finally destroyed, being replaced by the nearby town of Casarano.
Today, only the ancient parish church, S. Maria della Croce, remains. It has three naves, divided by pillars; there are fragments of frescoes from the 12th century and a portrait of Urban VI, who had given the cardinal’s hat to Pietro Tomacelli. The church represents an enlargement of an older building, originally with a cruciform plan, of which the eastern arm has disappeared to make way for the central nave, very similar in dimensions to the mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. The chapel, otherwise intact, with its characteristic rough masonry and well-constructed arches, as at Canosa, preserves part of its mosaic decoration, almost entirely in multicolored stones. In the central cupola, it features a starry sky in two shades of blue, at whose apex a Latin cross stands out in yellow stone tesserae; on the pendentives, acanthus scrolls unfurl; the arches are framed by a garland of leaves between two beaded bands. Only one of the barrel vaults of the arms of the cross is still adorned up to the springing by two lateral zones, bordered by a braid and an interlacing anguiform motif that converge inward in sinuous curves, framing round or trapezoidal fields containing animals, fruits, and flowers. Between these two compositions is a broad band of pinecone scales in various colors, and the whole is enclosed by five borders of gemstones, braids, foreshortened joists, and running dogs.
On the wall of this same arm, which may be called apsidal—also because the foot of the cross in the dome is oriented toward it—there are remnants of a mosaic depiction, of which part of an immobile celestial expanse remains, edged in red against a blue background speckled with dark tesserae. This almost certainly belongs to an image of the Virgin with the Child in her lap, perhaps echoed in the effigy on one of the pillars, datable to the 12th century.
These mosaics, the only surviving examples in all of Apulia, show parallels with those of Ravenna and other Italian monuments, as well as with related works from Syria and Africa. This is understandable in a region that, while not remaining isolated from the artistic movements of the peninsula, was at the same time clearly subject to the influences of Eastern schools and the opposite shore of the Mediterranean. They are to be dated, like the chapel itself, to the 5th century.