LUCERA, Diocese of. - City and diocese in the province of Foggia. It has an area of 65 sq km, 105,000 inhabitants, all Catholic; it has 21 parishes with 84 diocesan priests and 19 regulars, a seminary, 6 male religious communities and 23 female (Ann. Pont., 1951, p. 256).
The first two names in the list of the bishops of L., St. Bassus and St. Pardus, rest on no solid argument. Likewise a John and a Mark, supported by an anonymous medieval source, have no precise connection with L. (cf. Lanzoni, pp. 275-77).
In any case, the diocese of Lucera is historically attested at the end of the 5th century, when for the first time in two letters of Pope Gelasius I (Jaffé-Wattenbach, 631, 58) mention is made of a Lucerinus episcopus (493-95), followed, in order of time, by Anastasius (558-60), ordained by Pelagius I and recommended by the Pontiff to various persons. The Lucera catalogue then begins to become less obscure with Mark, who took part in the Synod of 743, held by Pope Zachary, then an Adelchius or Adelchisus (957), and then Albert, present at the Lateran Council of Leo VIII (964), Azzo, who took part in the Beneventan Synod of 1075, etc. Three of the successors are remembered: Rainald, present at the Lateran Council of Alexander III (1179); Nicholas, apostolic nuncio in the East (1261); Augustine, a Dominican, later a saint (d. 1323); Luca de' Gentili (1388), later cardinal; Andrea Matteo Palmieri (1534), cardinal; Scipione Borruto, killed by bandits (1591); and Domenico de' Liguori, a Neapolitan patrician (1717-29), founder of the episcopal palace and of the seminary.
MONUMENTS
The most important Christian monument of L. is the Gothic cathedral, a superb testimony of French art in Apulia. Quite rightly, Benedict XI congratulated Charles II of Anjou, who had built it in honor of the Virgin Assumed into Heaven, on the ruins of the Saracen mosque commissioned by the Swabian Frederick II. The church, begun in October 1300 and completed in 1317, has three naves, with a terminal apse with radiating chapels, like the churches of Provence, resting on sturdy buttresses. The facade, the interior and the transept all express a rough harmony of lines and masses, which the Gothic softens with its pointed arches and its refinements. In the interior are to be noted: the high altar, a monolith that was formerly a table in the Swabian palace of Castel Fiorentino, a statue of the Virgin (12th cent.?), some 14th-century frescoes with the statue of Charles II, a St. Francis by Solimena, and, in the treasury, the ciborium by G. da Nola and the cross in gold and silver by the Frenchman G. Verdelay (1305). Other notable churches are: the 14th-century little church of St. Francis, with a beautiful facade and a magnificent ceiling; St. Dominic and the Convent of St. Savior, both contemporary, but poorly preserved.
Bibliography9 works
Pasquale Testini